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Roscosmos CEO refutes claims space accidents rate is too high

He said that accidents in the process of launching space technologies occurred all along but in the past they were kept quiet about

Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Rogozin Mikhail Metzel/TASS

Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Rogozin

© Mikhail Metzel/TASS

MOSCOW, October 16. /TASS/. The CEO of Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, has dismissed as a false stereotype the opinion the rate of failures in the national space rocket industry is too high.

"I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the opinion of frequent failures is a false stereotype," he said, when asked what he would tell those space veterans who felt somewhat nervous about the industry’s current condition. Rogozin added there had been no aborted launches for a long time.

He said that accidents in the process of launching space technologies occurred all along but in the past they were kept quiet about. As an example he mentioned the Soviet Union’s 54 launches of Moon probes of which only 17 were successful.

Roscosmos said in its 2017 annual report that the statistics of Russian space launches indicated the rate of failures was at the international level. In June 2019, Rogozin said the launch of the Proton-M rocket carrying the space observatory Spektr-RG was postponed in order to improve the failure statistics trend. He said then there had been not a single year without a space incident since 2006.

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