I stand in wonder about launching an expensive comm sat on top of a cheap commie rocket. I wonder what the reliability of a Delta booster is v. the commie rocket.  As in anything else, you get what youi pay for.

The Russian's should have records for when the all the components of these launch vehicles were manufactured and assembled.  It might be a good idea to compile and compare the history of ALL launch vehicles that they have used.

 

The failures may be due to shifting from stored vehicles manufactured in the USSR (Cold War period) to ones of recent manufacture in re-opened facilities.  If so these might be considered a new case of launch vehicle due to the massive lose of institutional (work force) knowledge, and this is a "teething" problem.

Can I be honest?  I don't want to help the Russians make better rockets.  Let's get the Delta, etc., failure rates down first.

Lanceblade, if you need to launch some important satellites now, contact ESA and use Ariane 5 ECA ;) :

90% success rate (94% if you don't count partial failures)
Last 24 launch were success. It seems to be the best heavy launcher around there.

The basic Delta IV rocket has an operational reliability of 87.5% (7/8 x 100) meaning there's a 12.5% chance it'll fail at launch (currently). Since the Delta IV Heavy system is comprised of 3 rockets, and failure of one brings down the entire system, we have total reliability of 100- (12.5x3) = 62.5%, which is somewhat closer to the 50% record for the system. So actually, Wiki is right, you have to evaluate a system as a whole, and the more components there are, there less reliable it is. It's why the N-1 failed, incidentally, it had a huge number of engines compared to its contemporary the Saturn-V, thus failure of a single engine was relatively likely, and enough to consistently bring the whole system down.

The Delta IV HEAVY is in the beginning of its launch history [two launches]. The Ariane V's first launches were total failures - software guidance glitches: the instruction code exceeded the hardware processing speed]. So after two launches, its failures were 100%  or success rate=  0%.  The French, involved, grimly hung in there, and unlike their typical 1%er political managerial class, instead of dithering, lying, making  excuses, crafting alibis, typical  of an MBDA or Thales, the rocketeers of EADS FIXED IT. These are French rocketeers, a special elite, with a different creedo from the usual Marwan Lahoud criminal. "Make it work.", is their motto and they do.

So launch failure involves far more than simple mechanical complexity, cretin. You have to do the sheer math right.

And I might remind you LB, that BOTH Delta IV Heavies REACHED ORBIT. Check your facts on rocket failure before you write.

The December 2004 first launch of the Delta IV Heavy was a guidance failure. The payload [a dummy] went into the wrong orbit. Nobody is sure what happened.

Nominoe, I agree the Ariane 5 looks best in its class today. The Proton leads by sheer number of successful launches, which, I'm not sure how important that is in the industry, but I have a gut feeling that it does count.

And I said this. The modernized Delta IV has a long way to go before it matches Ariane, but then again, the Atlas series started as a crap rocket before all the bugs were worked out. I'm confident that US rocketeers will get it done.   

spaceflightnow.com mentions "an unexpected problem within its fuel lines".

hXXp://www.spaceflightnow.com/delta/d329/index.html