The successful launch of the Soyuz launch vehicle with 36 British OneWeb communications satellites from the Vostochny cosmodrome on May 29 was the 59th consecutive accident-free Russian space launch, according to calculations by RIA Novosti.
As the agency notes, this has not yet happened in the modern history of Russia.
The last launch accident was in 2018. Then the flight of the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) was interrupted due to a failure in the separation of the stages of the Soyuz-FG manned rocket. Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and American astronaut Nick Hague landed safely thanks to an emergency rescue system.
Since then, Russia has carried out 27 successful space launches from Baikonur, 19 from Plesetsk, six from Vostochny and seven from the Kourou cosmodrome in French Guiana. For comparison, during the same year and a half, 18 emergency space launches took place in the world: eight in China, three each in Iran and the United States, and two each in France and New Zealand.
The previous record of 58 consecutive successful space launches was set in Russia in 1992-1993. It was repeated on April 27, 2021, when Roscosmos launched 36 British OneWeb communications satellites into orbit.
At the same time, the agency writes, the USSR from January 1983 to November 1984 was able to perform 185 consecutive successful launches.
On December 29, the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, congratulated the state corporation on a successful and trouble-free year, announcing the launch of the Soyuz-ST rocket with a French satellite.