While modern liberal capitalist Russia with its oligarchs and chud politicians can eat my shit and hair, a) Putin isn't personally responsible for the craft crashing, this is just "Bad thing happened, how do we blame it on Very Bad Man" which is just pathetic journalism, and b) lots of things go wrong with these kinds of missions all the time. Even the successful ones are like "Oh, awesome, our craft landed upside down, there's dust over the solar panels, and one of the legs is broken, but we otherwise have a connection? That's a big W in my book!"

I put a solid 80% of the blame on Gorbachev and Yeltsin (and the absolute blood-sucking monstrous ghouls who conducted the shock doctrine) for everything in the Russian state decaying after the disastrous fall of the USSR. Putin's far from innocent in terms of liberalization of the economy and ideally he will be put up against the wall in a people's tribunal, but he inherited it from those two dipshits and it would be silly to pin the blame for the decay of Roscosmos solely on him.

Unrelated, but also worth noting that Russian missile and rocket engines are still second-to-none, so they still have a big role to play in a spacefaring near-to-mid future.

[–] u_tamtam@programming.dev 15 points 1 year ago

Not sure you spent as much time reading the article as you did writing your reply.
This is ArsTechnica/Eric Berger, not "RagNewsInc©": they went into quite the amount of details and facts explaining Putin's direct contribution to Russia's space program current state of affairs.
Despite the title, it didn't read (to me) as much politically motived as you make it to be.

[–] seas_surround@hexbear.net 4 points 1 year ago

they shouldn't have let Putin build the rocket smdh

[–] SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net

I know this is up your alleyway, not sure if you have any detail to add

[–] SimulatedLiberalism@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not much actually, you’ve put it very succinctly.

I do however find it bad taste to blame a failure in scientific endeavor on a country’s political leadership (which to be fair, deserves to be criticized in many other ways) while ignoring the fact that after the Space Shuttle program fraught with disasters ended in 2011, Russian spacecrafts were the only means to send American astronauts to space for nearly a decade (with near accident-free record) until SpaceX came along. If the Russians weren’t reliable on their space technology, do you think the NASA would even think about booking the Soyuz flights? (Keep in mind that the Columbia disaster killed all 7 astronauts, NASA would not even have considered Russian space flights if the risks would involve repeating such disasters)

Finally, I think many people who live in the first world Western countries seriously underestimated the consequences of what the Washington-led neoliberal shock therapy did to post-Soviet Russia. Entire industries were being carved out and mass unemployment and poverty happened in just a few years leading to crimes and even child prostitution (which had practically been eliminated during the Soviet times) were simply unthinkable for most people.

The modern day Russia is the consequence of Western imperialism, period. You can blame all the reactionary elements in the country and laugh at their poverty, but this is what being defeated by imperialism looks like. It will take decades if not longer to recover economically, especially under unprecedented sanctions, and all that has to factor into a lunar lander program that they last tried 47 years ago, no?