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Russia Pledges To Go To the Moon
An anonymous reader writes: Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, has announced it intends to bring humans to the Moon by roughly 2030. Russia plans a full-scale exploration of the Moon's surface. Agency head Oleg Ostapenko said that by the end of the next decade, "based on the results of lunar surface exploration by unmanned space probes, we will designate [the] most promising places for lunar expeditions and lunar bases.
"We choose to go to the moon in the next two decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they will take attention away from what's happening with the Ukraine." -- V. Putin
Going to the moon while the economy is crumbling, foreign countries are invaded and human rights are being trampled.
Are you talking about the U.S. or Russia?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I'm glad people like you exist.
No matter how unthinking and stupid I am sometimes, I will never, ever, ever say something as dumb as this argument is right now.
And, they will correctly point out that you've not been there in decades and are resting on your laurels.
Want to impress us? Beat them there again.
Otherwise you're just reliving glory days.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Regardless of what anyone 'agreed' to 50-odd years ago, that's what's going to happen in the next 50-odd years, and it looks like China and Russia are going to be competing to see which one breaks the seal first. If the U.S. wants in on the party, we'd better get off our increasingly large asses and get moving.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Great plan. Now all they need is 10 consecutive years of oil prices above $200/barrel to finance the enterprise.
Or... stop invading neighboring countries. One or the other.
Seems like the cooling relations between the US and Russia are already resulting in a lot more spaceflight initiatives. It's a shame that we cannot "yearn for the stars" out of wonder instead of conflict and competition.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Yes. It won't matter though.
Here's a couple hundred pieces of evidence.
But that's not what you said.
What you said that was particularly dumb is the fact that no one is currently doing X is somehow evidence X never happened.
A nice summary of modern Western propaganda, sadly and a good show of just far out it is. Soviet Pravda was closer to the truth in its analyses at its prime time than our media is today.
When you consider that if Putin actually wanted to do what our pundits claim he wants to do, he would have easily done it. For example, Russian Army pointedly pushed all the way to the established border of South Ossetia and Georgia with incredible rapidity, pushing attacking Georgian forces out about as fast as they could flee and then the Russian Army stopped like it hit a wall, even through Georgian army's fighting capability was completely destroyed by that point and going to Tbilisi just meant moving the armour about a hundred kilometers more.
Same thing with Ukraine. If Russia wanted to conquer it, it would have already, back in February. Considering that they didn't directly attack even after Ukrainians accidentally (?) shelled some towns on Russian side, killing a few people, or after a few hundred Ukrainian soldiers crossed onto their side only to find that locals just invited them in, fed them and sent them back, it's pretty silly to suggest that Russians "didn't invade Ukraine because they couldn't".
The entire demonisation as "undemocratic" of the leader who enjoys more genuine democratic support among his people than most Western leaders are enjoying among theirs is telling of just how entrenched the ability of established order in our media to spread blatant lies is today, almost two and a half decades after the end of Cold War.
Yes, comrade. Western propaganda is truly the most despicable of all. But they have Coca Cola and Adidas, and we have not.
Isn't it amazing? An economy fueled by little more than energy exports, a population still in decline, an economic war with a bloc of nations whose GDP in a bad year dwarfs its own by almost an order of a magnitude... and yup, it's going to enter the moon race.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
My 2 kopeks:
Russia "could" have done those things in the same sense that the USA "could" nuke Iran. It seems plainly evident that Russian aggression is being stopped not by the military might of Georgia or Ukraine but by the fact that Russia would join the "axis of evil" if they actually followed through with any such plans.
Putin does want to do those things. And he easily can do those things. However, the expected political fallout from doing those things is sufficient to discourage him from actually doing so. Pointing to the fact that he hasn't done those things does not prove in any way that he doesn't want to. The subjugation of Georgia or Ukraine would be a great boon for him in domestic politics if it didn't go hand in hand with ostracization from the rest of the civilized world.
I don't think anyone's saying that Putin is undemocratic because of a lack of domestic support. I think most objections today revolve around his refusal to respect the sovereignty of neighboring states. These are two orthogonal issues.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
There have been so few because, as it turns out, the moon is a terribly uninteresting place with really annoying dust.
"Terribly uninteresting"? How quaint.
The moon is the single best opportunity for the expansion of space exploration.
Guess what? Rockets large enough to send out to the asteroid belt with people in them, as a practical matter, are too damned big to launch from Earth. Did I hear "build them in orbit"? Nope. Too difficult, slow, and expensive. At our current level of technology you really need gravity to do practical construction on a very large scale. 1/6 the gravity? Perfect! Rockets built there don't have to be very large at all.
The moon has vast natural resources; they merely need to be extracted from the rock. Oxygen is one of them. There is also a surprising amount of fissionable material available. So... given some initial energy and material input, you can probably have sustained output, without too much "resupply" coming from Earth. And while energy requirements of a colony might be high, there are vast amounts of solar energy available, and plenty of silicon and trace elements to make solar cells.
Etc., etc. Our current U.S. government administration might be clueless about these things, but in the long run, the moon is our greatest hope for the future.
After they "went" to Ukraine, I prefer them going to the Moon than going to Poland.
The far more obvious reason why Russia has no interest in invading is the fact that its military resources are limited and it could only make one such invasion happen at best. And it has no interest in tying up its entire military capacity in such an invasion for decades.
Unlike US, it doesn't have the capability to invade and occupy multiple countries at once and still have significant military capability left over for maintaining other operations.
Last I checked, they still have a sizeable stockpile of nuclear arms. They "could" liberally nuke Georgia and Ukraine, thereby eliminating any ground opposition (and human population) in these territories and allowing them to annex them with minimal military commitment. It's not that hard to occupy a country when it's totally devoid of all life (and quite irradiated to match). The Tsar Bomba had a fireball radius of 4km and was capable of producing third degree burns 100km from ground zero, and it was only 50% of the max yield of a bomb of this design.
Of course, conversations like this (about what "could" happen) are ridiculous, as they ignore the reality of political factors being of primary consideration. Putin "could" do a lot of things, but talking about them as though they're remotely plausible isn't likely to yield any valuable insight into anything. That's the only point I was trying to make.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.