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

[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

[qwijibo]

In Putin's Russia, Chuck Norris copied him.

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.

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

[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: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: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.

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.

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

[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: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.

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.