[Ultra Sonic 007]

When dealing with space missions, sometimes you have to go back to the drawing board. Any faults or mishaps can't be dealt with due to the distance, and are often immediately deadly.

We ourselves have had enough fatal and non-fatal incidents in the history of American spaceflight to not have room to gloat when it happens to other countries.

(And sometimes it doesn't even have to involve spaceflight. We're barely two years removed from NASA's experimental UAV crashing after takeoff for no apparent reason.)

[marcusmaximus]

Of course there’s room to gloat everytime Putin fails to resurrect his twisted Soviet dreams.

[Bikkuri]

Remember the Mars mission where the engineers mistook mm for inches? 😦

[AnotherUnixGeek]

We ourselves have had enough fatal and non-fatal incidents in the history of American spaceflight to not have room to gloat when it happens to other countries.

Yup, exactly. We haven't had a soft landing on the Moon ourselves in half a century. This stuff takes practice, and the more nations involved in space exploration, the better for all of us. I'm hoping India will have better luck with their lander in a couple of days.

[dangus]

>> We ourselves have had enough fatal and non-fatal incidents in the history of American spaceflight to not have room to gloat when it happens to other countries. <<

Yeah, but this was not a flight test (like many early NASA crashes) or an experiment (like the recent SpaceX crash, which was an entirely successful mission despite the fact that SpaceX never even bothered supposing that it might NOT crash), but an utter, devastating failure of an entire program.

This is not “oops, now we know we need to account for...” but instead, “wtf?”

[PIF]

When dealing with space missions, sometimes you have to go back to the drawing board
—
In Russia, the drawing board has wheels and has left the room.

[Eleutheria5]

“We ourselves have had enough fatal and non-fatal incidents in the history of American spaceflight to not have room to gloat when it happens to other countries.”

This was non-fatal, because it was not a manned flight. As for gloating, don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.