Russia's New Cosmodome Approved

eldavojohn writes "You may recall discussing Baikonur, the Kazakhstan city rented by Russia that has been used as a launch site for quite some time. Today, Putin has just approved construction of Vostochny between 2010 and 2018 which will be positioned in the far east of Russia to complement the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the northern part of the country. This is not bad news for Kazakhstan as the director of the Russian Federal Space Agency has announced they plan to operate this facility alongside Baikonur."

Comments

Re:Long term, this is a good thing.

[FooAtWFU]

Russia having two space ports (similar to how the US has the Kennedy and Johnson space centers) is going to be one of the best things they can do. The more efficient the process of launching stuff into Earth orbit, not to mention out of orbit for interplanetary missions, the closer everyone comes to space based living.
See, why the heck "everyone" would want space-based living is beyond me. There's some darned nice stuff in Terrestrial living, like flowers and trees and grass and an atmosphere. What's the huge advantage of recreating all that stuff in space? Don't tell me it's "more room" or any garbage like that; it's fairly well-established there is plenty of space on the ground for people, it's the resources to support said people that impose limits on population capacity... and shooting things up into space doesn't do much to create more of such resources, either.

A multinational space race (or even better, cooperative missions) benefits everyone, even if its the side effects of materials developed for aerospace programs being used for everyday life. Yes, but: does it benefit everyone more than the tax money spent on such matters was just left in peoples' paychecks, to do whatever money normally does from that point on? This is not immediately obvious. Sure, previous space / weapons research money hit the jackpot by leading to cheap transistors and Computers, but I suspect this wild success is the exception, rather than the rule.