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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."
...do they have the technology to fake it as well as we did?
Table-ized A.I.
In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to YOU!!
Circumcision is child abuse.
You must be new on this planet.
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.
robots are still freaking cool and can pave the way for remotely constructing habitats.
That is true, but not very practical yet. Plus, the further away from the Earth, the longer it takes the signal to control them and get feedback. We'll probably have to wait until AI, and by then they might decide they don't want to keep us.
Table-ized A.I.
Can you efficiently make vodka on the moon, or would it have to be sent there?
Maybe 'Moon Vodka' could be a money making thing for them....Oh well..."Budem zdorovy!" *tosses back shot of vodka*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
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?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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
Treatment of the poor ... well, if you're poor, that means you don't have a lot of money. That's true. And if you want to get rid of your poor, you only have a few choices: forcibly transfer wealth from the non-poor to the poor (i.e. welfare state, and America spends a LOT of taxpayer money on that), kill all the poor or ship them elsewhere ... or figure out how to make real jobs for those people producing real goods. That's the trick.
The latter requires investment and forethought. Countries that fail to invest in the future (even to the exclusion of some current needs) often find that they don't have one. A future, that is. If I had to note what I consider the biggest failing of the United States right now, it's that we've lost our vision of the future, forgotten that the status-quo ante cannot be maintained indefinitely without a lot of work, and a lot of smart decisions. The penalty for failing to make those decisions now will be amplified manyfold as time goes on.
The problem with the "forget all those rocket thingies and research and spend the money on social programs" mindset is that it strips a society of the ability to improve. Yes, it is important to take care of your own, but to truly do that you have to look ahead, put money where it's mostly likely to have a good payoff. Scientific research has always had the best payoff, in the long term, and space is a big part of that.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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'
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
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?!
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!