India Ends Russian Space Partnership and Will Land On the Moon Alone

An anonymous reader writes: The Russian space program has experienced numerous accidents and delays recently, leading Indian officials to call into question its long term viability. Now India has decided to pull out of a partnership with Russia for a mission to the moon. According to the Examiner: "Previously, India was scheduled to launch a Russian lander on one of its rockets and send it to the lunar South Pole. Now, according to a story in Russia and India Report, India will go it alone, building its own lander to touch down on the lunar surface within the next few years.

Comments

Twenty five years of science destruction...

[virens]

... brought this shithole called russia to complete degradation of engineering and scientific potential. Typical salary of research assistant used to be 200 USD (back in 2008 when I worked there). Almost impossible to buy any modern (i.e. Western) equipment - local hardware has exorbitant pricetags with chinese-type quality. Median age of "researchers" was 65 years old. Outdated equipment from museums (I remember doing optical experiments with calibrated light sources from 1950 (sic)). Stupid nationalism - you cannot write Ph.D. in English, and almost no subscriptions to modern journals. They still live in 1960x, thinking they are great. I'm surprised that India waited this long to ditch those pompous morons.

Full disclosure: I used to work in MePHI as a research associate. I left this shithole, like everyone who wanted to do something worth of their life, and never looked back.

Re:Twenty five years of science destruction...

[Anonymous Coward]

I spent almost 10 years in MEPhI between 1989 and 1998, and it was really sad to see how everything was falling apart... One winter, there was no heating in all buildings, some heating pipes got frozen and some busted from ice... And the administration tried to make some money by renting some property to commercial organisation. So most of those who could do something useful started to leave. From I heard, the situation did not get much better in the 2000s.

Re:Twenty five years of science destruction...

[FilatovEV]

Perhaps if most of the country's wealth wasn't concentrated in the hands of a handful of corrupt oligarchs who live like a modern version of Roman emperors they'd be able to pay researchers a living wage.

Can you imagine that the rise of the class of super-rich was viewed as a huge achievement in Russia's 1990s? Like, we've ditched the ineffective Socialism and now we have the super-rich like the rest of the world! Isn't that the huge progress we've made?

Everyone is going to the Moon...

[__aaclcg7560]

Except for the United States. We're too busy planning to hump an asteroid in lunar orbit to explore future mining opportunities. Never mind that mining is illegal under existing space treaty.

Re:I'll believe it when I see it...

[Rei]

"Love" is the nice way to put it. "Largess at the expense of all other solar system exploration" would be more accurate. Here's a graph. And it's always the same stupid justifications - how many times can we pretend to be excited about "revelations" that Mars was once in its past a wet place? Or that we're going to stumble into life any time soon in its perchlorate-rich, destroys-organics-on-contact regolith?

And it's not just huge amounts of money that they're wasting - they're also throwing away most of the remainder of our plutonium supply. At least there's money to start making it again, but it'll take time. Plutonium is precious, and it's needed for outer planet missions.