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.

Comments

I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet Vladimir Putin isn't man enough to leave next month and travel to the moon, then plant the Russian flag on the surface of it.

Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not an Invasion.
It's a humanitarian effort to bring supplies to the lunies.

Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[Nidi62]

I bet Vladimir Putin isn't man enough to leave next month and travel to the moon, then plant the Russian flag on the surface of it.

Wouldn't work. When they show the picture of him planting that flag on the moon while not wearing a shirt everyone will know it was photoshopped.

Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[NotDrWho]

He would go, but all the extra Soyuz seats are currently occupied by American astronauts.

Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[SpzToid]

...[U.S. astronauts] who pay for their seats using United States dollars. Many millions of U.S. dollars actually. (Of course these seats were probably agreed to under some form of contract well before the spectacular and glorious Sochi Olympics started).

Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[meta-monkey]

Incorrect. Putin would plant the flag, on the moon, shirtless, and the moon would explode from exposure to his supreme manliness.

Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[gstoddart]

LOL ... since when did Putin replace Chuck Norris for that meme?

Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[qwijibo]

In Putin's Russia, Chuck Norris copied him.

Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[BringsApples]

I mean they have technology to go to space, what else is stopping them to go right now?

It's a good question, one of which everyone would probably have their own answer, all of which could be refuted by many others. It's almost as if this question isn't supposed to be asked without meeting friction.

Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[pushing-robot]

sorry guys watched iron sky with vlad now hes raving about moon nazis gtg my bad

Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[slashtivus]

NASA peaked at 4.41% of federal budget in 1966. That is nowhere near ~5% of GDP. Also what other than Apollo 1 disaster are you referring to as "sheer amount of failures"? It was overwhelmingly successful by most any reasonable assessment.

Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon

[schlachter]

Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, has announced it intends to bring humans to the Moon by roughly 2030

In the USA, Astronauts WENT to the moon, but in Putin Russia, humans are BROUGHT to the moon.

Most promising places

[i kan reed]

It's odd. We just checked, but there's some kind of large metallic object and a flagpole blocking the best few candidate positions.

Re:Most promising places

[halivar]

There have been so few because, as it turns out, the moon is a terribly uninteresting place with really annoying dust.

Re:Most promising places

[i kan reed]

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.

Re:Most promising places

[master_kaos]

Can you present proof that no one hasn't? Your the one arguing against the norm.

Re:Most promising places

[i kan reed]

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.

Re:Most promising places

[Thanshin]

I agree. And I'm also starting to think it's not even made of cheese.

I mean, come on! We saw no rats in any of the videos! Are they trying to convince us it's some kind of magical cheese that rats dislike? It simply makes no sense.

Re:Most promising places

[sudon't]

There have been 29 Moon landings. Six manned, twenty-three unmanned. The US hasn't gone since then because, it's fucking expensive, and the pissing war with the Soviets ended. But even if they flew your dumb ass to the Moon and rubbed your face into one of the many footprints on the surface, you'd think up some convoluted way that they must of faked it.

Re:Most promising places

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Re:Most promising places

[Immerman]

Even better - I'll let you collect your own: Get a nice powerful telescope and look at the moon, specifically the site of the "alleged" landing. See the flag? See the footprints? See the remnants of the landing module? If we didn't go to the moon that suggests that either:
1) Robotic technology of the time was far in excess of anything the public knew about, and we landed robots on the moon to walk around with a human-like gait
or
2) Those sneaky consipirators have managed to hack the lenses of every sufficiently powerful telescope on the planet to overlay a faked landing sight image when pointed at a specific point on the moon's surface.

Honestly I don't understand the popularity of this particular conspiracy theory - getting to the moon is basically pretty simple - shove a giant bottle rocket up your ass and hold on tight. Even factoring in the fact that you have to take a second bottle rocket with you to ride back home on it's not all that technologically impressive - by the time of the moon landing we already had pretty well worked out the engineering for making giant fucking rockets to rapidly deliver massively heavy bombs anywhere on the planet, and had used said rockets to deliver people to orbit and bring them down again, alive even. That's the hard part - energetially speaking once you've made it to orbit the moon is a lot closer than the Earth. You need to carry more rockets with you, but the only truly challenging engineering problem remaining is the whole vertical landing issue, and that's a far easier nut to crack on the moon than on Earth, thanks to the moon's much lower gravity and complete lack of crosswinds.

Because that makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, the USSR is back! Going to the moon while the economy is crumbling, foreign countries are invaded and human rights are being trampled.

Re:Because that makes sense

[NotDrWho]

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?

Re:Because that makes sense

[TheCreeep]

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?

Russia, obviously.
The US is not going to the moon anytime soon with NASA's budget.

Re:Because that makes sense

[camperdave]

By the time NASA arrives on the moon, its astronauts would be able to get chow mein, vodka, AND tandoori chicken from the locals.

Re:Because that makes sense

[Immerman]

>The ultimate high ground is certainly not the moon. Anything you lob at the Earth from there must first get out of the lunar gravity well, which would require a pretty significant expenditure of fuel.

Not really - the moon's gravity well is radically shallower than the Earth's, far shallower than the difference in surface gravity would suggest (the moon's surface is far closer to it's center, and thus gravity falls off far faster with altitude.) I can't be bothered to do the math, but if xkcd is to be believed the energy to launch a given rock from the moon launch would be about 20x lower than from Earth. Meanwhile that rock would have 20x more kinetic energy when it slammed into Earth than if it were being slammed into the moon.

More to the point the Moon offers shelter, concealment, an essentially unlimited supply of rocks to throw, and plenty of nuclear fuel as a root energy source. High ground involves more than just altitude after all - there's a world of difference between "having the high ground" and "being treed". If you're in open space you're pretty much treed - everyone can se *exactly* where you are, and you have no resources except those you tak with you.

As for lauching from the far side of the moon, that would probably be wise if you wanted to take your victims by surprise, and if you want to hit something specific you'll have to precisely navigate the non-trivial gravitational field of a binary planet regardless of where the launch point is, circling half way around the moon isn't going to make things that much more difficult when you're trying to throw a dart and hit a bulls-eye hundreds of thousands of km away across a constantly shifting gravitational landscape.

But then again, why would you need to take them by surprise? What good does it do to get a few hours warning that a city is about to be reduced to a smoking crater? You can't even begin to evacuate in that amount of time. At best you could try to intercept the incoming projectile with a high yield missile, presumably nuclear - in which case if you were successful then instead of vaporizing the city you end up covering the state with radioactive buck shot - after all blowing up an projectile doesn't significantly change it's trajectory. Plus that interceptor was probably a hell of a lot more expensive to build and launch than the rock it hit. Now multiply that by the fact that it's 20x cheaper to throw a rock at the Earth from the Moon than vice versa, and you get 20x the yield on impact, and the Moon has a 400x gravitational force multiplier on it's side. For every rock we could throw at them they could throw 400 smaller rocks back, each of which would do just as much damage as ours.

And of course they would have every bit as much warning as us about incoming projectiles crossing the 385,000km void - launch a missile at the moon and they can launch a cloud of gravel to intercept and destroy it. Make it heavy gravel and the interception doubles as a counterstrike.

Lil' Putin

[Anonymous Coward]

Vladimir Putin: I wanna invade the United States!
Advisor: Your majesty, that is most unwise at this point in time. I think you ...
Vladimir Putin: Then I wanna invade Georgia!
Adviser: Your majesty, as you recall we tried that already and ...
Vladimir Putin: Then I wanna invade Ukraine!
Adviser: Your majesty, that is already in progress as your ordered on your birthday ...
Vladimir Putin: *looks around the dinner table for invasion inspiration* I wanna invade Turkey!
Adviser: Your majesty! What has come over you? You know you're limited by doctrine to one invasion per year!
Vladimir Putin: *pouts and looks out the window* I wanna invade ... THE MOON.
Adviser: *murmurs quietly with other advisers* And, you promise this will be the last invasion? This will use up all your invasion credits, you know.
Vladimir Putin: Yes.
Adviser: Okay then finish your peas and we'll make a press release tomorrow.
Vladimir Putin: But I don't wanna finish my peas! I hate you, I hate you! You never let me do anything fun! I wish I was never born!

Re:Lil' Putin

[jez9999]

Why did I read the Putin lines in a George W Bush voice?

Re:Lil' Putin

[Luckyo]

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.

Re:Lil' Putin

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, comrade. Western propaganda is truly the most despicable of all. But they have Coca Cola and Adidas, and we have not.

Re:Lil' Putin

[NoImNotNineVolt]

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.

Re:Lil' Putin

[Luckyo]

Of course it is. The moment someone dares to point out the obvious propaganda in the Western media, he's a "Putin shill". The moment that same person points out the obvious propaganda in Russian media, he's "Obama shill".

You people are just tiring in the same countless rebuked claims, like that "Putin admitted to military operatives in Crimea", "Crimean vote was rigged", "There are fascists in power in Kiev", "Polish are openly attacking Eastern Ukrainians" and other propagandist bullshit.

All of these claims have been shown to be either false or taken out of context. No, Polish PM didn't admit to sending troops to Eastern Ukraine. No, Putin didn't admit to having anything other than military already present in Crimea as per contract with Ukraine in Crimea during the annexation.

Tired. So tired. You should just go fight it out with Russian shills directly. You deserve each other, and maybe in the mean time we could get some objectivity in our mass media instead of overwhelming wave after wave of bullshit where Ukrainian sources are quoted daily saying hyperbolic bullshit, and then debunking is posted on last page in small the next day as facts become available. All while front page is full of new bullshit.

Even Pravda at its peak wasn't quite as obvious in its propagandist lies.

Re:Lil' Putin

[NoImNotNineVolt]

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.

Have they seen the Apollo 18 footage yet?

[JudgeFurious]

There's a reason we didn't go back you know.

We choose to go to the moon...

[tlambert]

"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

Re:We choose to go to the moon...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Finally! Will he also get shot in two years?

Re:We choose to go to the moon...

[Luckyo]

"Russian puppet" was actively pushing for its own country's benefits by pitting EU and Russia against one another in what essentially amounted to a bidding war. I recommend actually familiarizing with Yanukovich's actions and why Russian leadership didn't attempt to seriously push to reinstate him as a result. He was anything but pro-Russian, as his tough bargaining significantly reduced Ukrainian gas bill and he was negotiating actually good terms from Ukraine's point of view with EU instead of total economic surrender of Ukraine to EU given by Poroshenko.

I'm guessing that West just figured it was cheaper to overthrow him and install a puppet that would economically surrender their country than to actually accept his terms, like they did during Cold War with Latin American leaders that tried to push for better lives for their citizenry.

Considering the ultimate result, I suspect that most in EU are hitting themselves and Fule was banned from quite a few of old boys clubs for his apparent idiocy, while Nuland got a lot of pats on the back for preventing any political alliance between EU and Russia in foreseeable future.

Re:So wait

[gstoddart]

We can tell them been there, done that, got the space suit.

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.

Militarization of the Moon

[kheldan]

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.

Re:Militarization of the Moon

[Mysticalfruit]

I agree, now that we've got the shuttle out of the way we should start investing money in reliable, reuseable man rated launch systems. Maybe we could get that guy whose making those fancy electric cars to do it!

Maybe we should build a space station and man it continuously and learn tons about spending months at a time in space. I know, we'll talk to the Russians! We'll call it the "International Space Station!" It'll be awesome!

You know what would be really awesome? We should send a bunch of rovers to Mars to learn about it's geology and ecology, maybe figure out why it doesn't have an atmosphere. We could learn all about the long term effects of materials on Mars so when we want to send people we'll know what to build the habitats out of.

On a serious note, we've got a HUGE jump on everybody else. The Chinese are easily 20 years behind us, the Russians are quickly falling behind. In the near future we're going to have at least one totally man rated launch system (Dragon) with another CST-100 coming along behind them. NASA has plans for the HLV as does SpaceX. My money is on SpaceX actually launching a HLV first.

As for the moon, the question is why would we go there? The argument is that setting up a long term settlement on the moon would require that we engineer materials and technologies to shield humans from cosmic rays and figure out food production, long term habitation, etc. with the safety net of being able to bail back to Earth.

My feeling is that if we were to settle the moon it would be merely as a stepping stone to Mars and then outward to Ganymede, etc.

Re:Militarization of the Moon

[Kjella]

At the bottom of a gravity well? Check. Ages of warning that an attack is incoming? Check. Horribly fragile base where any crack in your pressure dome will kill you? Check. Something tells me the moon will be as militarily relevant to a battle of earth as control of the ocean floors. If you want to get spectacular, I'd rather go out to the asteroid belt and find a suitably big rock (read: not a dino killer, not just a light show) you could aim at earth. The timing had better be just right though, if you're off by just a matter of hours that crater might end up on the wrong side of the planet. Bonus points for drilling into and blowing it up at a suitable distance, it'll do more damage as buckshot.

Cooling Relations = More Spaceflight

[lazarus]

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.

Good luck with that

[ArcadeMan]

The aliens on the dark side won't like that one bit. They made deals with the U.S.A., not Russia.

Re:So wait

[CrimsonAvenger]

Tell them that, and they'll point out that they only reason we went was because the Soviet Union was way ahead in the space race for several years and it took many years for us to catch up.

Many years to catch up? Seems to me we managed to pass them in just eight years.

As to "way ahead for several years", if you look at the details, they were about a year ahead for several years. They stopped being ahead considerably before the aforementioned eight years were up.

And what's with the Russians taking 16+ years to do this? It's not like they're doing it from scratch, since they saw how we did it 45 years ago. And it's not like they don't already have large rockets operational....

NASA's budget will now explode.

[Dega704]

Because nothing spurs congress to action faster than a chest-thumping contest with the Russians.

Re:So wait

[schlachter]

we already beat them there 6 times! how many, times do we need to "do it again?"

Thank you, Mr. Putin

[Control-Z]

NASA will now get more funding and we will see more space exploration.

Re:So wait

[NeverVotedBush]

Sadly we do have a lot of drooling, anti-science idiots. But I don't think that precludes going to Mars. It just means we'll have a lot of idiots running around misinterpreting photographs and video and claiming it was all a hoax.

why is it always 20 to 30 years away?

[k6mfw]

For past 50 or so years, US says it will send a man to Mars in 20 years. For past 50 (uh wait, 30) or so years, USSR/Russia says it will send a man to Moon in 20 years. Like we will have fusion power in 10 years like they've been saying for past 50 years. And next year we will have Hover-Cars, including conversion kits for people with vintage '80s DeLorean. But then these days we do have Picture-Phones.

Re:So wait

[painandgreed]

The Russians are going to take sixteen years to do theirs. Best wishes!

Pretty much, but I doubt they'll actually go. Sixteen years out is a pretty long time to take. I bet they don't even up their space spending this year. ...or the next. Sixteen years from now will be somebody else's probably rather than Putin's most likely. My cynical take is that it will go exactly where all of Bush's talk in each Presidential address about going to Mars went, nowhere past the news reporters.