[tzfld]

The Russians had too many issues with their launchers in the past years, so this seems to be part of a trend, and not an isolated case.

As you said, this is rocket science. High corruption level and incompetent officials can be very destructive in domains like space exploration.

[adrianN]

Eh, launch failures are probably approximately Poisson distributed. It's not unlikely for them to appear in clumps.

[solarkraft]

Unfortunately that's not a great argument for moving more of the work to the US :-)

[adventured]

The US doesn't suffer from a very high level of corruption. So yes, it's a reasonable argument for moving more of the work to the US.

Transparency International ranks the US with Belgium and just behind Australia and Iceland on corruption.

Russia is #135, below Ukraine and Myanmar.

[craftyguy]

Maybe a case of "the corruption you might stand a chance to expose, vs. the corruption you don't"?