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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.
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.
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.