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Russia To Establish Bases On the Moon
ananyo writes "Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, has said that Russia will pursue extensive, long-lived operations at the Moon's surface. 'We're not talking about repeating what mankind achieved 40 years ago,' Popovkin said, through a translator at the Global Space Exploration Conference in Washington DC. 'We're talking about establishing permanent bases.' The heads of the space agencies for Europe, Canada and Russia, along with senior representatives from the space agencies of India and Japan were in Washington DC talking about the benefits of international collaboration. JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, also issued a clear pronouncement about targeting the Moon."
The rich are getting really creative hiding their money from the government now...
It's perfectly natural for the head of a space agency to want to expand what his agency does.
Follow-up questions:
(1) Has the Russian government actually committed budget to the proposal?
(2) What does Russia expect to accomplish with its moon base?
Note that Russia has been talking about this for a while.
In Soviet Russia, base moons you!
Isn't it interesting how you come to recognize posters based solely on their sigs???
error prone
Their space program hasn't lost a single man since the early 70's. Can NASA say that?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
3 areas of concern as seen on the ISS
1) If you go full international everything will take 10 times as long and cost 10 times as much. That does NOT mean you should go isolationist. If the Americans want to drop a lab literally next door, thats OK, even if they want to share power and air thats OK. But you have to be firm about each item being owned and responsible by precisely one nation (or at most a very small group) and you cannot make the whole project or even subprojects depend on that one nation's work. If the Germans want to land a really cool telescope and click it into position next to the base like a lego block, fine. But if you need a full UN treaty to launch some oxygen tanks then you're completely F'd as those guys are utterly ineffective.
2) Permanent as in ongoing perpetual expansion like a stereotypical overseas military base, or permanent as in we've not decided when to abandon ship yet? The danger of not being in perpetual expansion mode is you'll probably end up like the ISS, in construction for 99% of its lifetime and the week after the last bolt is tightened, its time to deorbit and give up. Permanent as in we intend to expand or improve this base to the tune of $1B/yr in perpetuity is a pretty good idea. Project management with a defined yet nebulous end date after which its managerially abandonded is a great idea for making "a" disposable rocket engine. Its a terrible idea for an entire base, or a station, or even a vehicle program.
3) Please don't do the space shuttle and ISS thing of promising everything to everyone for free and instantly, and then scaling back until its a miserable failure compared to its original goals. So the ISS could hold 24 crew. OK, lets build everything to the assumption that the hotel labor load will be 2 people working full time, thats less than 10% of the crew changing air filters and gaskets or unclogging toilets or whatever the hotel load is on a station. Whoops we're imploding the crew size to 6, now a minimum of 1/3 of the on-orbit time is spent maintaining the station. Whoops. Suddenly a station where most of the people do scientific research turns into an aerospace version of "this old house". Whoops.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I imagine that situation is not much worse than what most /.ers live with anyway.
Yeah, their space program is such a joke. All they did was put the first satellite in space, first orbit, first man and woman in space, first space station, first probes on Venus and Mars--in fact, pretty much every space "first" except man on the moon. And they're currently the only country in the world capable of even putting a man in orbit. Ha, ha, what a joke! Let's all laugh at them!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It'd be a sad thing to expand the worst of our nature to the moon and make the sands of that distant void red with blood.
Yeah, reserve that for Mars, which is named after a war god and conveniently already is red. :-)
At one time, US used to be the lead in grand endeavors, but laziness, political infighting, and lack of true leadership has paralyzed the American will.
I hope to live long enough to see America return
As an American I wish the Russians luck and hope they actually do this and succeed. I hope that if they successfully do this it may motivate the powers-that-be over here to emphasize science a little more than they have been. And even if America doesn't take the hint and start emphasizing science again it would be a freaking moon base! :) That is neat no matter who is doing it.
The decommissioning work done to prepare the shuttles for museum display rendered them beyond any practical ability to return to service. Large parts of the internal structure were chopped out to remove contaminated fuel tanks, etc. It would likely be faster and cheaper to build a new shuttle than to try to fly one of the museum display orbiters again.
Add in the fact that the supply chain for things like external tanks and other shuttle parts was dismantled several years ago, and many of the specialized jigs and fixtures sold off for scrap.
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