Russia Plans Its Own Moon Base

Socguy writes "After being rebuffed by NASA, Russia now plans to build its own moon base by as early as 2027. The nation now plans to send a manned mission to the moon by 2025 and establish a permanent base shortly thereafter. 'According to our estimates, we will be ready for a manned flight to the moon in 2025,' Roskosmos chief Anatoly Perminov told state news agency RIA Novosti. A station that could be inhabited could be built there between 2027 and 2032, he said. While Russia will be refurbishing existing spacecraft, the U.S. is taking a different approach after the space station is finished and plans to scrap the space shuttle program in favour of a new kind of spaceship to be called Orion."

Comments

Don't NASA even know their own history?

[Rogerborg]

Project Orion was nuclear powered spacecraft. Are their Marketdroids really so bereft of imagination that they couldn't think of another name for the STS replacement?

Re:Don't NASA even know their own history?

[tgd]

It was never a NASA project -- it was a General Atomic project and was slowed significantly by funding issues and eventually killed by the nuclear test ban treaty.

So saying NASA doesn't know their history is being a bit unfair to NASA -- I'm sure everyone there knows what Orion was, but also know at no point was Orion a NASA-funded or NASA-affiliated project. It never got much beyond the design stage, some micro-yield nuclear devices aside.

And I don't need to search the intartubes to know the Orion history...

Re:We are not ready

[enrevanche]

This has nothing to do with interest in space exploration. It is about investing in local technology companies and making sure that the technologies are mastered by local industry. It is also about investing a lot of money into military applicable technologies.

Re:Fuck you.

[Carbon016]

Underpopulation is going to be the problem for most of the developed world, with falling birth rates. Replacement number is 2.1 children per (the .1 for ..uh.."accidents" during childhood), and most developed countries are actually under that. The U.S. is 2.09, France is 1.98, etc. In 2000, the total world number was 2.80, and it has since declined to around 2.59. So, on average, the world is only spitting out one child more than is needed to replace their parents SOME of the time, and it seems like it will continue to fall. For the record, I agree with parent, though.

Re:Yeah right

[evilviper]

You mean to tell me it spends more on this than on defense? Not even close! Defense used to be 20% of the whole budget in non war years.

That's just completely and totally wrong.

I picked 2000 to fit your critera. Name a year if you want to actually argue anything.

Federal:
15% National Defense
22% Social Security
11% Medicare
6% Medicaid
6% Reserved for Social Security

That puts social programs at 45% (more for education, et al.), over 3X the spending on National Defense.

What's more, only an idiot would just compare the federal dollars. You see, in the US we have a little something called STATES. Now, these "states" spend very, very little of their money on "defense" since that's almost entirely a federal issue. These "states" however spend a huge percentage of their state revenues on social programs, and is where 90% of the money for education comes from. If you just look at federal taxes, you'd think we don't spend anything on education, but you'd be completely wrong... and you, in fact, are.

Re:Plans are cheap

[jpop32]

I don't think they have a big enough credit card.

Umm, think again... Currently, Russia holds the third largest money reserves in the world. They are running budget surpluses for seven years straight (thanks to oil & gas prices), last year they ended up $100+ billion in the black. Meanwhile, the US is close to $900 billion in the red. So, as far as credit goes, the US could be considered sub-prime market, unlike the russians, who would have a number of platinum cards to choose from.

Re:Really bad idea, until we have a base establish

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the Sea Dragon had this in mind. It was less efficient other rockets but much simpler. While the physical testing would be more expensive due to size, the crews to support it would be smaller than that which was required during component testing for the Saturn V. It was expected that the size of the ground crew to support and launch it would be at about the same size or smaller than that of the Saturn V. It was also designed to be reusable.

It is interesting that the estimated price tag was about the same per launch as the actual cost of the Saturn V. This may have been wishful thinking, but even if it were twice that value it would still be less than half the cost per unit mass of the Saturn V put something in LEO. Of course, there aren't a lot of 550 tonne programs. Even the ISS will have less mass when complete. On the other hand, this rocket would be very useful for massive lunar bases or Mars missions (for which it was primarily designed).