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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."
global warming, ozone holes: Relatively pointless to solve. An asteroid hitting the planet will cause far more damage than someone not being able to grown corn in their backyard any more.
overpopulation: Unsolvable, unless you like forced abortions.
nuclear threat: Unsolvable, the genie is out of the bottle.
If we stay on Earth, we as a race, are fucked. No - not just Americans. No - not just those brown-skinned terrorist folks. No, not the Jews, or the gays, or the Democrats. EVERYONE. EVERY LAST MAN, WOMAN, CHILD AND SMALL FUZZY ANIMAL. *FUCKED*
So, hey, let's ignore that fact and start Wars on everything, hey? Hate to break it to you, but utopian fantasies aren't ever going to come true. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.
Seeing as how many Russian hospitals can't even get running water, it's not unreasonable to call bullshit on this claim. The country is still by-and-large in shambles, struggling to survive. They just recently announced a military build-up as well. Good'ole Putin sure is a winner, sinking that ship even further.
Do we really need to build a dozen because US, Russia, China, India, Europe, Japan can not agree to invest a billion dollar-equivalents each instead of spending 10 times more money for separate bases?
Co-operation would be good, but would it be the best method? Maybe not. If we have 10 people independently working on 1 problem, we could get as many as 10 solutions. If everyone works together, we get no more than 1 solution. (Of course they'll come up with many ideas, but they'll only fully develop and test one.)
This is not about invention -- it's about engineering. Imagine if the world's civil engineers had all worked together to build bridges and between them, they'd built millions of bridges like the Mississippi bridge that recently collapsed, or the Tahoma narrows bridge. We could now be living in a world without bridges.
And consider the houses in earthquake zones. It's the Big One and 50% of the town is levelled. Had there been one engineering team in charge of all houses, maybe 100% would have been safe -- or maybe 100% would have collapsed.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Yeah, but one reason that the ground crews are so extensive is that conventionally fueled rockets must use razor thin safety factors: they are over 90% fuel mass, after all. If you can get it down to 50% fuel mass (like an airplane) or 5% fuel mass (like cars) you can afford to have much higher safety factors on not just the structure, but also the mission planning.
If your car was made of paper and 90% of it's mass fuel and used that up just going to the grocery store and back (and all of that was on the to trip; the trip back is downhill, but you gotta time it just right) you'd probably want a ground crew for it as well.
With robustness comes smaller ground crews. How large is the ground crew for autos and airplanes? In both cases, it's less than one operator per vehicle. In both cases, infrastructure improvements are projected to eventually obviate the physical drivers as well. The shuttle needs so many more because it's experimental and only just barely makes it to its destination both in terms of fuel and structure.
It's just too bad that NERVA and ORION put out big clouds of radioactive materials. They'd really be quite useful for getting out of the atmosphere, being both high thrust AND high Isp. Usually you have to pick one or the other.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Orion was never a NASA project.
Shoot, I can plan a base on the moon. Doesn't mean a thing. It will cost them billions of rubles to actually DO it, and I don't think they have a big enough credit card.
I favor many more launches over bigger rockets. Many of the costs, including ground crews, R&D, launch infrastructure are mostly fixed costs. So the cost per launch goes down a lot when you increase your launch rate. Also, high launch frequency gives you valuable experience to make your future launches safer and more efficient. And that in turn helps with such things as insurance, another big cost of launching rockets.
Even if you are right about population (I'd have to disagree, the world might be CAPABLE of supporting 12 billion but the US about as heavily and densely populated as it SHOULD be) that still ignores the fact that if one of the many big rocks hurling at our planet should hit it we are toast.
The space program will begin to progress at a more reasonable rate once it is out of government hands. Private corporations will hush up accidents so they aren't as afraid of mishaps. They also understand that there are literally billions of expendable lives on earth. People are relatively cheap and plentiful, robots are valuable.