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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.
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.
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.
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.
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