Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base

An anonymous reader writes "Having established its presence in the Crimean Peninsula, Russia is now shooting for a bit loftier goal, a permanent Moon base. 'As reported by the Voice of Russia, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told the government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta that establishing a permanent Moon base has become one of the country's top space priorities. "The moon is not an intermediate point in the [space] race, it is a separate, even a self-contained goal," Rogozin reportedly said. "It would hardly be rational to make some ten or twenty flights to the moon, and then wind it all up and fly to the Mars or some asteroids."'"

Comments

Shoot for the moon..

[fred911]

The Crimea is significantly less costly.

There isn't enough rubles in Moscow

[rmdingler]

Good luck if the contractors are the ones who built roads and infrastructure for the Sochi Olympics.

Re:There isn't enough rubles in Moscow

[Runaway1956]

If Russians have the will to go to the moon, then they are miles ahead of us. The American people, and especially the American politicians, lack the will.

Perhaps you would like to debate the ultimate weapon now?

Russia

[Kyusaku Natsume]

We can say anything about their government, but we can't say that they are not really ambitious.

Re:The Moon is a Harsh Mistress comes to reality..

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh get off your paranoid, childish sci-fi melodrama. Never mind the fact that a Moon base with enough resources to pull that off will never exist, it doesn't even make sense in the first place. You're just channeling your inner monkey fantasizing about the biggest tree house you can think of... to throw rocks on other monkeys.

Grow up.

Re:Talk is cheap

[stoploss]

I expect that given many tens of billions of dollars, and a few decades, the Russians could manage to do most of these proposals, but there is no intent to actually do any of them aside from a neat-looking study.

Okay, let's say you're correct and that the Russian space program is a sham with overly inflated goals. Where does that leave the US space program, given that we have no way to even get to LEO without begging for a ride from the Russians?

I have given up on NASA and their "designed by committee, for maximum pork" launch systems that cost $1+ billion per launch. Maybe SpaceX will make something man-rated soon and then our country's space program won't be such a joke anymore.

tl;dr: I'd rather we had the Russian program than NASA because at least the Russians can get people into space. We're back to where we were in the 1950's...

Re:Annex?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the Crimean

Angara

[benjfowler]

They can't even launch Proton reliably, and it's taken them 20 years of R&D to get Angara to the point where they can (nearly) launch it.

As it is, the Russian space programme has gone from world-beater, to being a bad parody of Kerbal Space Program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Talk is cheap. I'll believe they can build a Moon base, when I see it.

better than wasting trillions on pointless wars

[Anonymous Coward]

What did US achieve with all that money and lives. It alienated us in the world stage and achieved nothing of value in the end. Ike was right:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

Russia wants a lot of things.

[goodmanj]

Russia's manned space program basically consists of announcing plans to do amazing things, which come to nothing as they keeping on doing the same stuff they were doing in the 1980s. As opposed to the U.S. manned space program, which consists of making plans to get back to the stuff they were doing in the 1980s, which come to nothing.

(Unmanned is another story.)

Re:The guy is demented...

[rmdingler]

Bold, public, optimistic predictions are an historically cheaper way to fund nationalistic fervor than actual deeds and accomplishments.

Re:Talk is cheap

[thoth]

All these problems you attribute to NASA are actually congressional problems. NASA budgets are are the chopping block every year. The only way they get stuff passed is by distributing the work to every Congress member's districts. That's fucked up as you would expect, but we're a country that doesn't give a shit about funding science, paying scientists very well, or even listening to scientists. In fact there's a whole industry around discrediting climate scientists, since that threatens corporate profits, and a huge number of adults Americans don't believe in evolution. Entertainment and sports are the heroes and finance is where the big bucks are.

Re:So..

[jamstar7]

It would appear that Tea Party Politics are a form of infectious disease, and it's spreading to Russia. Does anyone have the time to tell Capt.PutPut that the USSR, and the Space Race are over?

I dunno, from here, it looks like he's attempting a Soviet Reunion.

Hope he can get the original drummer when he 'gets the badn back together'...

Re:Annex?

[jamstar7]

Tell that to the Crimean

Sure, because trampling over a neighbor's backyard is the same as going to the fucking moon.

Point being made is, it was 'illegal' for Putin to annex Crimea.

He did it anyway.

Re:Propaganda much?

[FatLittleMonkey]

Ethnically, it wasn't Russian until the 1940's when Stalin deported (and murdered) a shitload of locals and trucked in Russian-speaking replacements.

Before that, it was no more Russian than India was "English".

Putin apologists are weird. Russia signed an explicitly unambigious agreement to respect Ukrainian sovereignty and existing borders. Putin violated that agreement. It's not complicated.