The three stages implicated above are built by different manufacturers. Proton and the Briz-M are products of the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center, Fregat is manufactured by NPO Lavochkin, and the Soyuz—along with its native upper stage—is built by RSC Energia.

During some of the mishaps, upper stages shut down prematurely. This was the case in 2011, when a Soyuz third stage died 325 seconds after liftoff—just one minute sooner than yesterday's incident occurred.

When multiple upper stage burns are required, as is often the case with Briz-M flights, improper firing durations have placed payloads into incorrect orbits. If that happens, a satellite can sometimes crawl its way to the right spot; other times, it tumbles back to Earth after a few days.

But other than the fact that most of the accidents have involved upper stages, there isn't an easily identifiable common thread between the accidents. It turns out the real reason for Russia's rocket woes may be tied to the country's changing economic and demographic landscape.

Earlier this this year, Russia approved a 10-year, $20 billion space budget. That's barely more than NASA receives in a single year, and represented a 64 percent slash from what was originally proposed in 2014.

"The Russian space sector is short of funding, and may be having difficulties maintaining its quality control standards," said John Logsdon, a Planetary Society board member and professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.

Additionally, Russia's workforce is shrinking. Since the 1990s, the country's population has steadily declined, despite an influx of more than 9 million immigrants. Those migrants have filled some of the country's job vacancies, but the overall effect, according to the Brookings Institute, is that Russia faces a sharp decline in labor quality.

Worse yet, due to larger economic pressures, the country isn't able to make large-scale education investments, said David Belcher, an analysis manager at the Washington, D.C.-based Avascent consulting group.

"The effect of that is that they have a skills mismatch in certain industrial sectors, that appears to include the launch industry," he told me. "The fact that we've seen several instances of Russian rockets not working as designed the past few years seems to support that thesis."