Russia's MASSIVE MIssile is a MASSIVE FAILURE

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[k]

It wasn't a launch failure, it was a swimming pool excavation exercise that went exactly to plan.

[Maddscot]

If only their missiles were powered by strike gum...but alas, they are not...

[keithjackson]

Reported as a successful launch by RT...they did mention that more work is needed on the range for the system as 0 meters is a bit short of their target right now.

[gi_nattak]

They really need to stop smoking close to missiles.

[DavidGirling]

More likely is that the things actually worked when first produced, but then the manufacturers decided to put some money in their pockets and cut corners in the production, and any that were sent into service weren't stored properly, serviced properly, or protected from thieves who nicked parts from them on the principle that they would never be used so who would notice. If you know what you are doing, and how to connect things to them, missiles have top of the range sat-navs. At the start of the war one Russian tank regiment could only get 1/3 of their tanks in working order, even with cannibalising, because so much had been stolen from them, including complete engines.

[conorpp]

The reason Russia announced the new Sarmat missile is that the engines being used for their existing missiles were produced in Ukraine. So this announcement came after the Russian annexation of Crimea and Donbas. So They could no longer source the required spare parts for the engines powering their nuclear arsenal

Whenever the Kremlin says it never happened that's a confession😉

[terryfaugno]

The footage at 4:34, with all the trees blown down in an outwardly expanding radial pattern are at one of the 3 major ammo depots that were struck in the same timeframe (Toropets, Tikhoretsk, and Krasnodar Krai) as the launch accident with the Sarmat-2. IIRC, those pics you're showing are Krasnodar Krai, which had slightly less ammo tonnage stored, but had everything either in the open or in standard tin roof warehouse storage, and not allegedly nuke proof hardened concrete magazines at Toropets.

10000% not an ICBM launch site, though there was stuff getting sent into orbit from there.

[StephenSowles]

They got the explosive part to work perfectly. Now if they could made it fly.

[juliollontop]

Putin can get it up.... maybe the guy who knew the right ratio of gas was shipped to the front, and nobody can read his notes

[grumpynerd]

The RS-28 uses Unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) as fuel with a dinitrogen tetroxide oxidizer (N204). These are "hypergolic" -- which means you don't have to ignite them, they explode on contact with each other, which simplifies the engine design. These chemicals are challenging to store because they're highly corrosive, chemically reactive, and volatile. N204 boils away at room temperature.

For that reason you can't keep them in the missile, like you do with the solid propellants of US missiles. You keep them in tanks then when it's time to launch you pump them into the missile... *while it is sitting inside of an enclosed silo*. Everything -- not just on the missile, but in the silo as well have to be *meticulously* constructed and maintained, because leaks will cause a massive explosion. Now Russia actually is very good at rocket engines (as is Ukraine), although the ones from their space program we know are super-reliable come different company and run on much safer fuels. But Russia is not so good at maintaining stuff. So I wouldn't be surprised if the actual problems with the RS-28 launches were in the silo.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the Ukrainian angle here: the reason the Russians started a crash program to develop the RS-28 in 2014 was that their primary silo based ICBM, the R-36M, was Ukrainian. Russia relied on Ukrainian factories for parts and Ukrainian technicians to maintain them. 46 of these Ukrainian missiles are still in service, but Russia has had to maintain them for the past ten years without technical data held in Ukraine. If they have indeed been maintained, they must be an untested Franken-missiles by now, a mix of Ukrainian and Russian "modernized" parts.

Russia does have road mobile ICBMs with solid rockets, and submarine missiles, which use a variety of propellants. So theoretically it does still have a nuclear deterrent. However -- nuclear warheads need maintenance too. Each of the 1600 deployed thermonuclear warheads in Russia's arsenal requires about thirty thousand dollars of tritium replaced on average per year. How much of that money actually gets spent on tritium, do you think?

Russia is just steadily degrading . . .

[edwinmartin]

when your engineers want be independant and you try to bring them back at the point of a gun☠☠☠☠💀💀💀
trying to re-create the tunguska event

[Ifoughtpiranhas]

Liquid fueled ICBM's went out in the 1960's. It's bizarre that they are still using that technology for a "new" ICBM when they are so dangerous to operate.

[timh]

Russians like playing Kerbal Space Program for reals!

[Slava-ukraini_]

Bro it's Satan like the devil not sa-tan

[braider]

It’s your typical Russian “efficiency” and “corruption”.

Not surprised in the least. Look at the T-14, even the SU-57 is second rate.

[Randomactivities.]

It'd be a bad day to anyone on the receiving end of that thing. Crazy part is that the first victims were probably those working on it.

[tommix]

They were roleplaying the Tungska event.

[echomande]

The Sarmat missile was almost certainly commissioned because the previous heavy ICBM, the SS-18 Satan, was (partly?) built at a ukrainian factory. It is probably also intended as one-to-one replacement, using existing silo's. That means that Sarmat will use the same fuel, storable liquids, as SS-18 and be the same size and weight as Sarmat. SS-18 and Sarmat are cold launch missiles. That means that they are physically ejected up from their silos (by a gas generator) and only ignite their engines a few feet above the ground. There are other heavy missiles that are launched this way, notably all sea launched ballistic missiles.

What happened in this instance could have happened for any one of several reasons. It could have been a maintenance error, as in someone dropped a wrench down the silo which pierced the missile's (thin) skin in a couple of places. Note that this could have happened some time back, while the missile was unfuekled. Alternately, something could have gone wrong during fueling (liquid fueled missiles are not kept fueled) causing fuel and oxydizer to come into contact. Yet another possibility is a launch failure in which the missile was ejected from the silo but for whatever reason failed to light its engines and fell back into the silo.