While the world reads more and more about successful NASA missions taking mankind into entirely new domains, things aren't going quite as well right now for the other pioneers on the subject back on Earth, as a Russian space launch in 2015 ended up in disaster - for the second time in less than one month.
While back in the 50s and 60s the Russians were ahead of the so-called space race during the Cold War before NASA astronauts reached the moon in 1969, more than two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union this is a thing of the past, as Russian space launches in 2015 seem inclined to fail.
According to Space Flight Now, last Saturday a Russian space launch 2015 ended up in failure after a Proton rocket that carried a high-tech Mexican satellite (for the country's new space-based communication network costing approximately $1.6 billion) crashed in Siberia not long after liftoff.
The Russian space launch 2015 accident occurred eight and one half minutes after takeoff, right before the booster was supposed to disconnect from an upper stage that would have put the satellite, Mexsat 1, into an orbit over 22,000 miles above our planet.
The Guardian reports that the Russian space launch 2015 has seen a growing number of issues in the past few months: in late April, the country's space program abandoned a mission to supply the International Space Station (ISS) costing $51 million following another accident, when a Progress M-27M cargo ship couldn't dock with the ISS following problems - and it ended up burning up upon reentry to our planet.
This meant that almost three tons of supplies didn't make it to the ISS.
CNN reports that Roscosmos (the Russian equivalent to NASA) has a long-standing reputation of launching a very high number of rockets per year, and most of them manage to complete their missions; but the agency's currently going through a series of problems.
Other Russian space launch 2015 include a similar problem exactly one year ago, when ground experts lost contact with a Proton-M rocket that went off course and ultimately burned in the atmosphere.
