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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."'"
...just don't let them put nuclear waste up there. You don't want it to rip itself out of orbit.
Battlezone?
Good luck if the contractors are the ones who built roads and infrastructure for the Sochi Olympics.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Is plan: 1: First infiltrate with masked astronauts without insignia. 2: Build government offices, and seize them. 3: Have popular vote 4: Profit!
We can say anything about their government, but we can't say that they are not really ambitious.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Every few years, one of the Russian aerospace companies presents a new "plan" to go to Mars, colonize the moon, teleport to the Sun (at night, of course), etc. All they need is a few billion or so to get it going. It's slightly more credible that that letter you got from the Nigerian prince.
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.
Russia has no plans to annex the Moon. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty makes this legally impossible, and common sense shows that it could never (or, at least, not for a good long while) be enforced.
Just temporarily embarrassed space explorers.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The navy's new railgun should be able to fire out of the moon's gravity well. Could hit the Earth, or Mars from there. It would be interesting to test acuracy of a 390,000 km shot.
Learn to love Alaska
I can't be sure what the previous poster was disagreeable about, but every one knows monkeys throw poo, not rocks
Russia doesn't want to establish a moon base, but they're obligated to step up and protect all the Russian speakers on the moon. Moreover the moon is historically Russian, not only did a recent referendum establish that 98.3% of the moon wants to join Russia, but the moon is so close that on a clear night you can actually see it from Moscow!!
I stole this Sig
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'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.)
Bold, public, optimistic predictions are an historically cheaper way to fund nationalistic fervor than actual deeds and accomplishments.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Unless they were eating rocks.
If the US economy crashes again all he has to do is wait and that will come true.
How do we get the whole thing off the ground?
I read of a beautiful idea in a scientific magazine called Omni. It suggested the use of virtual reality systems to control robots on the moon. This would enable us to build the first colony more efficiently because robots need only raw energy. We send a rocket to the moon, on the rocket we put machine tools and intelligent systems, with which can build both more machinery and the necessary superstructure to house a biosphere. We now have the ability to use our hands at a distance.
The high cost to the human race's colonisation of space, is caused by the complexity and danger of reaching and leaving escape velocity within the earth's atmosphere whilst carrying the fuel up from the earth's surface with which to do so.
The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts. There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week. Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week. One idea could be to create rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split the moon's water into hydrogen and oxygen which makes very good rocket fuel. Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship One, to and from escape velocity in the safety of a vacuum.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
No. Living standards in teh Ukraine are significantly below those in Russia, and the Crimean was one of the poorest parts of the Ukraine. Before the referendum, Russia has promised to raise pensions and salaries of state employees to in the Crimean to russin standards. This will cost them billions. With the troubles and embargos, the Crimean will not generate much income: Economically, it relied on tourim and agriculture. Now there are no tourists any more, and the can't sell their Crimean sparkling wine to the world either. And then the EMbargos hurt Russias ecoomy as a whole as well.
Philipp
Landing on the moon and taking off again adds 4km/s delta-v to the energy cost of going to Mars.
Plus launching from lunar orbit into Mars transfer orbit is less efficient than launching from LEO directly into MTO, due to Oberth inefficiencies.
The net effect is that there's no benefit from using the moon as an intermediate step, unless the cost of manufacturing fuel on the moon is vastly less than the cost of launching it from Earth into LEO. However, the equipment cost for mining, purifying, and electrolysing polar ice into hydrogen/oxygen, then liquefying the cryo-gases into fuel tanks and launching those tanks back into Lunar orbit (using yet more lunar fuel) is likely to be ridiculously high.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
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.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
In communist Russia, base moons you!
Russia isn't pulling out of ISS. They're in it for the long haul, and they haven't been shy about making that unambiguously known. When NASA announced a tentative schedule to deorbit the ISS at the end of its planned service life, Russia IMMEDIATELY said it would regard any attempt to deorbit the ISS as an act of war. The Russian modules were built (at higher cost) to be serviced and refurbished indefinitely in space, and they fully intend to keep it up there until they literally don't have the ability to keep it in orbit.
Russia's new plan is to launch additional modules to make its half of the ISS capable of existing on its own, but leave it connected to the rest of the ISS as long as NASA's side remains in space. They might reserve the right to close interior doors, have alcohol on board (if they don't already), and tell their American neighbors that there are rooms they aren't allowed to go into, but they recognize that even if the US and Russian sides were functionally independent, having them docked together profoundly improves the likelihood of both crews surviving a disaster.
If NASA were to officially decide to deorbit its half of the ISS on a specific date, I'd be shocked if the Russians DIDN'T politely (but firmly) inform the Americans on board a few days before the separation that they were going to be going home ahead of schedule & would NOT be deorbiting NASA's half as officially planned. There's no way in HELL Russia will voluntarily allow the American half to be deorbited if it has any meaningful value to them in space, even as scrap.
Of course the US would scream, and Washington would claim it was an act of war/piracy, but as long as the American crew members got home safely & smiling, I'm sure the Russians would negotiate the American side's purchase as scrap, and lease-back agreement that would allow the US to continue using it as long as it remained habitable.
That's because Ukraine couldn't afford to develop the natural resources of the region. For Russia, who can afford that, it will be an income generator. It's not about tourists and the 'embargo' is a joke.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Or better example - Kosovo. There was no vote there either - Albanians just moved in & possessed it, and the US supported them & bombed Serbia over Kosovo, and finally recognized its independence. What Russia did in Crimea was a lot more legit than what the West supported in Kosovo.
At the same time, 'self-determination', which is so important for the Albanians, doesn't apply to Bosnian Serbs in Srpska.