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Europe and Russia Are Headed Back To the Moon Together (bbc.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Russia is turning its attention to the moon again for the first time in about 40 years. The first Russian mission to the moon since long before the end of the Cold War will be Luna 27, a robot lander that will touch down on the edge of the lunar South Pole as early as 2020. Russia is looking for international partners to help make Luna 27 a reality and may have found one in the European Space Agency, according to a story on the BBC. "The initial missions will be robotic. Luna 27 will land on the edge of the South Pole Aitken basin. The south polar region has areas which are always dark. These are some of the coldest places in the Solar System. As such, they are icy prisons for water and other chemicals that have been shielded from heating by the Sun. According to Dr. James Carpenter, ESA's lead scientist on the project, one of the main aims is to investigate the potential use of this water as a resource for the future, and to find out what it can tell us about the origins of life in the inner Solar System."
The last time the USSR or Russia launched a successful probe outside of low earth orbit was 1984, with the Vega missions.
Ever since then, they've talked big, and failed big. Usually projects never got as far as physical hardware, but occasionally some things were built, such as the Mars96 impactor, or Fobos-Grunt, but those didn't work.
Russia has a decent track record at building space stations and satellites. For anything further out, they're an embarassing failure.
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (http://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/), built, launched, and operated by NASA, is in orbit around the moon right now and doing science there. That makes it the only currently operating spacecraft in orbit around the moon. That is, the USA NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA has so many operating space vehicles out there doing science that people tend to not notice after a while.
The USA sent the first probes to Venus and Mars, Mariner 2 to Venus in 1962 and Mariner 4 to Mars in 1964. The USSR sent the first landers to each, but the first spacecraft to successfully fly by and study the two planets were American.
Forgetting Skylab, now are we?
Mir was bigger and modular (Skylab was monolithic), but it wasn't the first space station - construction started over a decade after Skylab was launched.
You mean China?
The Russians have largely gotten lucky, in that most of their Soyuz to catastrophically fail have been the unmanned launches, even though they're largely built on the same components. The failure rate has gotten pretty damned awful of late. As has the rate of dangerous "glitches" on returning vehicles
The number of deaths issue is based on a statistical sample size of only a tiny number of fatal accidents on both sides, and is thus dominated more by noise than by signal. It's also skewed by the size of the crews - each side has only had two fatal space missions, but the US crews were several times larger. The broader category that includes injuries, near misses, etc gives a greater sample size and paints a reversed picture: the rate is far higher on the Russian side.
Why does everyone keep forgetting about China in these conversations?
That was, of course, the US's decision to retire the Shuttle and hitch rides with the Russians. Of course, they couldn't retire the Shuttle when they wanted to, they had to keep it operating to finish the station as the Russians didn't have any launch vehicles nearly large enough to carry the larger payloads. Russia still lags behind in large payloads, particularly in reaching higher orbits - the Proton M, Russia's most powerful rocket, carries 6,7 tonnes to GTO while the Delta IV carries 14,2 tonnes. Early next year the Falcon Heavy should have its maiden launch, with a GTO payload of 21,2 tonnes. Russia has nothing even comparable in the near pipeline.
Russia has always had trouble with heavy lift. The N1 was perhaps one of the most spectacular rocket program failures in history, a rocket about the size of the Saturn V, a massive program, and every launch ended in an explosion. Perhaps their "most successful" heavy lifter was the Energia, but it never flew in its heavy lift configuration, and only flew twice in any configuration at all.
As for missions beyond Earth:
Moon race: 28 failures, 15 successes, versus 16 failures and 16 successes for the US. Notable features include a couple tiny sample returns and the first quality remote rover - versus the US... well, the Apollo Program ;)
Mars: 20 failures, 2 successes (only orbiters, and only "mostly successful), versus 6 failures and 18 successes for the US. Mars was probably the Soviet/Russian space program's biggest realm of embarrassment.
Venus: 16 failures, 13 successes, versus 1 failure and 6 successes. By contrast, Venus was the Soviet/Russian program's biggest success - but largely simply because they threw a lot more things at it than the US, which by and large seemed relatively uninterested in our evil twin.
Mercury: Russia/USSR never tried. US, 2 successes.
Asteroids: Never tried. US, 3 failures, 8 successes.
In fact, Russia/USSR never went anywhere in the solar system outside of Mars. Beyond the asteroid belt, their grand total of attempts was zero. The US has not had a single outer planets mission failure, and 23 successful missions (although some of that is double-counting, as a number of spacecraft visited multiple planets).
Early on, there's no question who was in the lead - the Soviets were, unquestionably. By the mid 1960s, though, the tables had reversed. Since then, the Soviets/Russians have had a pretty spotty record with sp
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.