What’s wrong with them?

“The Russian space sector is short of funding, and may be having difficulties maintaining its quality control standards,” said John Logsdon, a Planetary Society board member and professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.

Additionally, Russia’s workforce is shrinking. Since the 1990s, the country’s population has steadily declined, despite an influx of more than 9 million immigrants. Those migrants have filled some of the country’s job vacancies, but the overall effect, according to the Brookings Institute, is that Russia faces a sharp decline in labor quality.

Worse yet, due to larger economic pressures, the country isn’t able to make large-scale education investments, said David Belcher, an analysis manager at the Washington, D.C.-based Avascent consulting group.

“The effect of that is that they have a skills mismatch in certain industrial sectors, that appears to include the launch industry,” he told me. “The fact that we’ve seen several instances of Russian rockets not working as designed the past few years seems to support that thesis.”

And yet we’re relying on them to get our astronauts to the ISS, because “safety is the highest priority.”

[Mid-afternoon update]

Looks like the stage went kablooey. Which is kind of bad, because it’s the same one they use for crew. Wonder if it would have been abortable?

[Update a few minutes later]

A reminder that Jim Oberg warned about this over a year ago.