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Russia To Study Martian Moons Once Again

Posted by timothy on from the phobos-grunties dept.

Robbie writes "The Russian space program once faced bleak prospects, receiving meager government funding. Meanwhile, the United States and the ESA continued to send automatic probes to the Red Planet. NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers are now crawling on the planet's surface, while their Russian prototypes never lifted off and are now on display at the Space Research Institute's museum. However, the situation seems to be improving today. Under a stage-by-stage national program for studying Mars, the Phobos-Grunt automatic probe will be launched in October 2009. This cutting-edge modular spacecraft costs just 1.5 billion rubles ($64.4 million)."

13 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Bread and circuses, minus the bread by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I study minority languages of Russia and travel to many areas of the country outside the big, internationally known cities. There is desparate poverty everywhere. I'm not one of those killjoys who think you have to completely solve all human ills before launching anything into space, but it's a big mystery how Russia can come up with money for space, and yet can't seem to raise the standard of living enough to stop its demographic implosion and high rates of unemployment and deadly alcoholism. The country's priorities are so much more mixed up than the homelands of NASA or the ESA that they should seriously put this on hold.

    1. Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread by mahmud · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'm not one of those killjoys who think you have to completely solve all human ills before launching anything into space, but it's a big mystery how Russia can come up with money for space, and yet can't seem to raise the standard of living enough to stop its demographic implosion and high rates of unemployment and deadly alcoholism.

      Because if you actually studied Economics instead of minority languages, you would understand that Russia is already overspending on its social programmes. Giving money to the poor is the best way to fuel the inflation. Plus 65M$ is a drop in a bucket compared to the current Russian currency reserves.

      I am not one of those killjoys who think that poor people shouldn't be helped at all and that the markets should completely take over the welfare functions but it's a big mystery how some people fail to see the big picture even though they routinely travel through the country and are exposed to the economic processes taking care there.

    2. Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Informative

      Giving money to the poor is the best way to fuel the inflation.

      You don't have to directly hand out cash to people to eradicate poverty. Governments routinely boost the economies of regions hard hit by giving tax breaks to local businesses, maintain the infrastructure they built, and spend more on education there. (Adjacent republics in Russia can have wildly different economies based on how well the schools are preparing people for a global economy, look at the difference between poor Yoshkar-Ola and increasingly affluent Cheboksary.)

    3. Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Informative

      Oops, to continue my last post: it seems like Russia is abandoning huge amounts of its territory in a way I've never seen in the U.S. or the EU. Things are left to rot, people pack up and move to Moscow (virtually every young minority person I know is there already or is planning to go soon) or abroad, and no local businesses ever come in. And yet, as it self-defeatingly retreats from all this space, the Asian portion of which which is ripe for China to eventually grab through force or demographics, Russia gets more nationalistic and ethnocentric of late.

    4. Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread by mahmud · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I guess what you are pointing at is the difference in the quality of management by the governors and the local legislative and executive bodies in different places.

      Certainly the quality of the bureaucrats in Russia has a lot of drastic improvements to make. Still, having a decent space program does in no way interfer with the management issues that plague the Russian "glubinka". Quite to the contrary, if the youth of the country will see that the once powerful scientific industry of the country is getting up on its feet again, they will be more eager to join the engineering courses, and other scientific studies that have lost a lot of their glitter and prestige during the wild 90's.

    5. Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread by antirelic · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There is never a good time to do anything when it comes to the suffering/malignancies of humanity. If we used every problem as a reason to stop moving forward in other areas, the United States would never have put a man on the moon. Just take a look at this wiki page with references to 1969:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969

      You have the Vietnam War, massive protests throughout the country, civil rights movements (and everything that went along with it)... etc.. The world will always be a messy place, no reason to stop making progress.

      --
      20th century Marxism is not progress...
    6. Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread by Notquitecajun · · Score: 3, Funny

      Head hurting...how the HECK did you get off mentioning Hitler and not breaking Godwin's?

  2. That's no moon... by oodaloop · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...wait, my bad. It's a moon.

    --
    Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
    1. Re:That's no moon... by Ihlosi · · Score: 4, Funny
      ...wait, my bad. It's a moon.

      Just wait until they introduce a hydrostatic equilibrum requirement for moons. When that happens, it'll be a dwarf moon. Or a Phoboid.

  3. Re:Phobos Grunt = Doom guy by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Grunt" is the Russian word for "soil", not a word for "An infantry soldier. slang (orig. US)". But still, yours is an interesting thought. :-)

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  4. Re:Moon by smittyoneeach · · Score: 3, Funny

    In Soviet Unification Church, Moon marries you!

    --
    Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
  5. Phobos is intriguing by denver38 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Phobos never failed to intrigue me. From Wikipedia: Phobos's unusually close orbit around its parent planet produces some unusual effects. As seen from Phobos, Mars would appear 6,400 times larger and 2,500 times brighter than the full Moon appears from Earth, taking up a quarter of the width of a celestial hemisphere. Some nice pictures of Mars, including Phobos, can be found here: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/06/martian_skies.html

  6. I wish they would go back to Venus by mbone · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Basically all of our knowledge of the surface of Venus comes from the Soviet Venera spacecraft. The Soviets developed the ability to land spacecraft on the hellishly hot surface of Venus, conduct experiments, and send back some pretty cool pictures.

    Given that Venus is pretty similar to the Earth, except with run-away global warming, and that no other space agency has seen fit to do any surface missions, I wish that the Russians would send some more landers to Venus.