The last two Soyuz flights (or to be more precise, landings) are worrying NASA.
Via email from Jim Oberg, who notes a quote of his that the reporter didn't use: "NASA would have a hard time developing any other human space transport system in the next 4-5 years as reliable as the soyuz. We now realize that the Soyuz backup systems were effective in insuring a reliable - if very rough - landing in these previous cases."
What a policy mess.
Evidence of a Global market.
If we are truly becoming a global market then we should see wages fall in the high wage areas and climb in the low wage areas. The Quote in the soyuz article:
"The companies talk about this all the time -- about how young Russians want to go into banking or sales, where the pay is higher," said Oberg, the former NASA official. "They see this as a real threat to their industry."
Says that this is happening.
Paul
The talk "how young Russians want to go into banking or sales, where the pay is higher" (in Jim's words) is really nothing new. At my former job, in cutting edge VLSI design, a specific program was instituted together with MFTI (a famous polytech U. in the town of Dolgoprudny, the essential rival of my alma mater), basically internships. It produced a few students a each year. One of these bright young men, who came through the program and joined full-time -- I remember his face well, but forgot his name -- designed a part of the big Itanium-beating chip, which was a serious job. But in 1996 he quit and went to work for a bank. Honestly, I doubt that the bank offered a compensation package which has beaten ours. We were paid in the low thousands per months, and funnily enough it's more than most get these days in the field. So, why? Simply put, the work was TOO HARD.
To sum, I think a big part of it is a loss of work ethics, rather than just the pay. I remmeber well how my nephew declared his life's goal to be a racketeer. No, seriously. This kind of ethos permeated the society. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to work on an assembly line for obsolete buckets of bolts.