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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."
The Russians first said it was their idea not to participate:
RIA Novosti, 25.05.2007
"No plans to join NASA lunar program - Russian space agency"
Five days later BBC said Interfax carried the claim that the US turned them down:
BBC News, 30.04.2007
"NASA 'rejects Russia Moon help'"
The same day NASA said it didn't turn down Russia because it never got an offer:
New Scientist Space, 30.04.2007
"NASA denies that it has received any proposal from Russia to conduct joint moon activities, despite media reports to the contrary."
Four months later CBC ignores NASA, quotes Interfax, and credits RIA Novosti:
CBC News, 31.08.2007
"Spurned by NASA, Russia plans its own moon base"
Not content to sit still with this mere confusion, CBC includes in their article a graphic from AP with a caption that contradicts the "spurned" claim:
"NASA has said it will establish an international base camp on one of the moon's poles"
Did Russia misread this, leading them to send a mission to the north pole to claim it for themselves? Or was that just one more piece in this grand conspiracy to drive the Canadians slowly crazy, and to see if we could get them to send people to the north pole?
I suspect the following accounting (also 30.04.2007) to be as accurate as any of the others:
"A reporter from TheSpoof.com was sent forthwith to find out why but no one at NASA was willing to discuss the issue. All he could glean was that they would be taking a replica of the original Moon Lander with them, presumably for some kind of celebration.
After our intrepid reporter arrived back to TheSpoof.com offices, he was contacted by someone who wouldn't leave their name but simply stated that "there are no plans to take a replica Moon Lander as there is already one up there"
Mr Perminov said "personally, I think they do not want us to get to the Moon first, because they don't want us to find out that they didn't really get there in 1969 and that the whole thing was filmed on a sound stage in Nevada"
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
...Exploration someone trumps in with:
* What about the starving children?
* Maybe we should cure cancer first?
* What about AIDS?
* We can't even cloth/feed/house our own people. Why not that first?
* The ________________ nation doesn't even have running water (electricity, enough food, etc) for everyone. Why spend resources on space?
You wanna know why?
Because exploring space and ensuring a future for the human genome is WAAAAAAY more important than all of that. Period. There is no debate. Any argument that you make that says, "Don't do Space Exploration because XXXX is more important, " can easily be shown to be silly by the simple statement:
"If human beings remained confined to this planet they will become extinct."
Thank You,
G.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
This seems to be turning into a real space race. On one hand we have china and india competing in who will land a human first, and on the other hand we have Russia and the US competing for the first moon base. But in the end, the US will be looked upon as the total victor of this space race as well. The reason is that because of their new long term vision, the US is the only contender that will develop a way to go to mars at the same time as they're planning the moon trip. By 2030 when moon bases are old news, everyone will be looking at mars but the US will be the only country with a chance to get there. Mars will probably be the end of this space race since its so much harder to go anywhere else.
;)
On the other hand, that also means the americans probably won't keep ther moon base manned for many years. The russians probably will though and the moon base will become their source of space prestige.
Meanwhile, ESA will stick to cheap, unmanned missions: 500 years of world domination means the europeans don't need to prove anything
Well it will be a pity if the world's big countries can't collaborate on this - and leave a space at the table for the Chinese too while you're at it - but it does strike me as a little ironic that the Americans are rolling up their sleeves to re-invent the Apollo spacecraft as the big step forward. Hand crafted solutions vs Russian mass production again? Presumably it will be a whole lot cheaper for the Russians, who are still turning out Soyuz same as they ever were, to tweak an improved model a bit. I suppose the earlier Russian (Soviet) plans were based on quite a bit of hardware which is tried and tested (apart from the N1 rocket).
I have to say it's all a bit disappointing that the biggest vision that the Americans can come up with is an updated version of the kit they were using 50 years ago. The romantic in me had hoped that even if the only way to get to planets is in disposable capsules, maybe we'd have come up with some reusable craft for the hopping between the planets and their satellites. That way we might get to use it a few times on the Earth-Moon shuttle and maybe even have a go at looking at Mars...
In addition to contraceptives and education, the third part which is also important is to increase the living standard. Historically, as living standards and health care reach a certain minimum level, birthrates start rapidly dropping all of their own.
In fact, if the rest of the world caught up with the developed countries, we'd be faced with a big problem of how to avoid the population from dropping dramatically - most industrialized countries populations are currently propped up by immigration.
Do you imagine that the hole in the ozone layer or global warming or global CO2 concentrations were thouroughly mapped without spacefaring technology? What else is out there that effects our entire planet that we have not discovered yet, are not yet aware of, because we are not standing outside of the system in order to see it? Shall we all hide our heads in the sand? Return to living in tipi's? Were the first mammels ready when they first ventured out of the forest treetops? Were the first Europeans ready when they crossed a dangerous ocean in primitive boats to build a new life in a harsh and hostile environment? Had they solved all of the problems in the Old world first? Were the first pioneers who set out across relatively unknown lands in covered wagons, hauling their wives, children and families with them to seek some temporary measure of freedom... ready? Had they solved all of the problems they left behind them before moving on? Or had they discovered it is pointless to argue with those who are set on maintaining the status quo, because lack of change gives the illusion of saftey? And in so discovering, set out to do for themselves what others saw as threatening?
Colonizing the moon, the asteroids and the planets will not stop you from solving the problems here on Earth. Some of the solutions created by those pioneers addressing their own problems will undoubtedly be of benefit to you. Rather than condemning such efforts, you might try looking on future colonists as potential allies.
Far better to use Saturns or just slightly bigger and do many more launches. The high costs of launches are NOT the rockets themselves, but the ground crew. The shuttle costs about 1B/launch because of the fixed costs of ground crew to service them. Spacex is doing it right. They are designing their rockets to have a VERY minimal team (big part of the reason why they use jet fuel rather than hydrogen). They do have in the works a BFR (big fucking rocket), where the engine itself is pushing into the F1 (saturn V) class. Combine that with the spacex plan to use 9 engines on a booster, AND are tying together 3 boosters, and suddenly you are looking at a monster, in a hopefully cheap config. But that is planned for later this decade. perhaps combine that with a maglev launcher, and we are looking at a low costs launcher.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Does the ISS serve any useful purpose...? Scrapping it would save billions.
Going to the moon could be big business if the whole Helium3 thing works out. The USA should be joining international efforts to build a shared moonbase.
Save the planet, etc.
No sig today...
If there's one thing Orion definitely won't be, it's "a new kind of spaceship". It's the same fundamental design used by every other manned vehicle with the exception of the STS and Buran (which sadly never made a manned flight), all the way back to Vostok-1.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
One thing is resurrecting the monster in Russia, and that is the high price of oil. Middle-East terrorism has the same cause. Every fill of the gas tank sends wealth and strength straight into the pockets of Putin and Muslim extremists. Without this windfall, they would be powerless. If we really care about national security and global stability, we must develop sustainable energy sources.
"As for India or the rest of the third world, they've never put enough resource into trying."
Dude you're clueless - some many years ago the India gov went on a forced, military-backed campaign to effectively neuter their young men... shit man - it was so terrible no body wants to remember, and no body in India wants to take any sort of government backed measure to reduce population growth.. my dad still remembers that time, it was damn scary.
but to build a base, methinks youd need something heftier..
Not necessarily. All you need is more flights and/or round-trips.
Actually, building a moon station, while farther away, may still cost less energy than building a space station, if done right, because you don't have to lift as much mass from the Earth! Most of the heavy materials needed for the superstructure is already on the moon. Just dig out some caves (which can be done by robots which don't need a costly artificial atmosphere), seal 'em off with light titanium or similar stuff flown in from the earth, fill it with the usual set of cables, pipes etc... and there you have a nice, perfectly usable permanent underground moon base! It may take some years to build, but since it's a modular design, it can be done over an extended period of time. And if you're already on the moon, you could start mining and using the local minerals etc... to extend the station.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
SpaceX is also only working on a 500 kg payload class vehicle, and it's unmanned. I think the only other rocket in this class is the Orbital Sciences Minotaur. Hopefully their lean methods will be able to carry over somewhat when they start doing COTS launches, but that will still be a long ways short of what NASA is proposing with Constellation.
SpaceX hasn't done anything with the BFR except some design studies on the engines (at least, not that they've told anyone about). Frankly, as big of a project just getting the Falcon 1 and 9 off the ground, consuming most of their capital, it wouldn't make sense for them to do so.
The Falcon 9/Dragon will have a LEO payload capacity of around 20,000 pounds. That's about 2/5 what the Ares 1 will have and less than 1/10 of what the Ares 5 will be capable of. It's a little bit more than a Soyuz. The Falcon 9 Heavy (with three boosters) is still planned, but not certain. It will have a capacity similar to a Ares 1, but still a lot smaller than either an Ares 5 or Saturn.
When you add on man-rating, things get really complicated, and that's something the Falcon 1 didn't have to deal with. Keep in mind, SpaceX hasn't gotten a rocket into orbit yet.
I believe the problem with NERVA was that the material at the interface between the reactor and the propulsion mass becomes radioactive, and this material tended to ablate.
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