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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.
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.