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JAXA H-3 launch failed. 2nd stage failed to ignite. This is the 2nd attempt of the aborted Feb 17th launch.

From 5:17 to 6:30, the 1st and 2nd stage separation is shown. Velocity kept dropping after the moment when 2nd stage engine was supposed to have been ignited.

At least the first stage worked fine. It can be pretty much of a mess to test upper stages. The US does have dedicated facilities for testing something like that but most countries don't. You can do atmospheric testing, which is what most countries end up doing, but it is suboptimal.

It would be of interest to see what the actual state of the Russian space program is. In LEO, it seems to be doing ok. At least as far as getting cosmonauts to the ISS and deploying satellites like the one below:


OTOH, the last space probe the russians attempted was Fobos-Grunt in 2012 and Mars 96 in 1996. Both were lost in LEO. The next would be the Luna-Glob (or Lunar-25), which was supposed to launch last year, but now will launch supposedly in July:


That said, some are calling out the leak problems on the capsules lately amongst other issues to say the Russian space program is in trouble:

Russia a decade ago had quite a few launch failures with Proton and upper stages. They seem to have fixed those issues at least.

They also built a new Soyuz launch pad in the Russian Far East which decreases their dependency on using the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan.

They still have issues with lack of capable enough space grade electronics though. And they need to finish construction of the new Angara launch pad in the Russian Far East.

Still, they do have the Soyuz launcher, and that works just fine. It is more than good enough for the kind of satellites Russia needs to launch.

I'd like a second source on this. I forgot to add it to the Roscosmos centric post above:


The title is trash, but still...yikes if true.

The Kazakh authorities are being idiots. Russia and Kazakhstan were jointly building a launch pad for a rocket (Yenisei) which was supposed to replace the Ukrainian made Zenith rocket. It is quite likely that Russia put that rocket in the back burner to save money after the war in Ukraine started.

The Zenith had similar performance to the Soyuz. Russia can launch the Soyuz from their own launch pad at Vochtochny. International client launch demand for Russian space services is also down, since the war started. Right now Russia depends on the Kazakhstan launch pads to launch the Proton, but it will be replaced with the Angara pad at Vochtochny eventually. Baikonur is also necessary for the manned space launches. But Russia is supposed to leave the ISS program this decade. Russia pays Kazakhstan hundreds of million USD a year of lease to use Baikonur. If the Kazakh authorities continue being intransigent Russia will just use Vochtochny.

The Japanese Lunar Lander has entered lunar orbit and will attempt a landing by end of April:

JUICE, the ESA orbiter, is getting ready to launch: