Russia has suffered a failed Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) test after a launch at the Yasny range in the Orenburg region ended in an explosion only seconds after liftoff. The missile rose roughly 200–400 meters before detonating in midair and
They just lost their Soyuz launch pad too. Dumpster fire is too mild of a way to characterize the state of their rocket program
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This is rocketry, forgetting to secure a maintenance platform is a big deal especially on a piece of equipment as complicated as the soyuz launch pad. Two consecutive failures wouldn’t make for a dumpster fire in most cases, but these are both supposed to be some of the most reliable rocket platforms in the world, and so failures like this are very concerning.
Edit: Finally found a decent picture of the thing that wasn’t secured:
Yeah, no. Fucking up the safety checks on a massive piece of infrastructure like “the enormous platform that you use to put the boosters together” is indicative of a huge systemic failure.
Any protocol worth its weight should account for human error. Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. This system got them a 2 year+ inoperable launch pad.