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

Luna-cy

[DynaSoar]

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"

Russian engineering vs US science...

[fantomas]

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...

Re:We're not moties

[vidarh]

It is working well for China - their population is on track to peak and start reducing in a few decades. As for India or the rest of the third world, they've never put enough resource into trying.

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.

Really bad idea, until we have a base established

[WindBourne]

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.

"a new kind of spaceship"??

[OriginalArlen]

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.