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Russian Moon Landing May Take As Many As Six Launches (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Russia has made no secret of its desire to land cosmonauts on the lunar surface sometime in the late 2020s. As the United States, at least for the current administration, has decided to bypass the moon in favor of Mars, Russia could move to wipe out the humiliation it suffered at the hands of NASA when it lost the 1960s race to the moon with the landing of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. However, a story in TASS suggests that a Russian moon landing effort would be complex, requiring up to six launches of its Angara rocket.
FTSummary: Russia could move to wipe out the humiliation it suffered at the hands of NASA when it lost the 1960s race to the moon with the landing of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969.
Uhm, "lost" the space race?
Sputnik? Remember?
Oh, and Russia also landed a craft on, and beamed back images from, the surface of Venus. They were first. In fact, and I expect to be corrected, I don't recall the US ever landing a probe on Venus that did anything other than send back a few blips of telemetry readings before dissolving in the Venusian atmosphere.
6 launches isn't complex. We do twice that many flights to ISS every year. In total, we've done over 160 flights to ISS, with Russia doing over half of those.
Anyway, I bet they can do it in 4 Angara launches. Russia is super experienced with in-space rendezvous, autonomous docking, and even more advanced things like propellant transfer (which they do regularly at ISS). 4 or even 6 launches would be no problem.
They'll save a ridiculous amount of money by not building a megarocket like we insist on.
But I agree with the skeptical posters here. Russia always talks about these sorts of things and never does them (not that we're much better). I think it's code-word for "if oil gets over $150/barrel and stays there, then we can do this."
Patriotism is a disease that makes a moron believe (s)he's better than someone else because (s)he's better than someone else because they were squeezed from a vagina that either already was a citizen of a country or squeezed from it in said country.
Unless you're ass was the one planted in the pod which landed on the moon, you're the asshole who thinks Armstrong said "On small step for the United States". A man landed and walked on the moon and you make this about national boundaries? This is about what we can accomplish as human beings if we set our minds to it. Using something that barely counts as a computer and communications systems which worked nearly by accident, we sent humans riding on an enormous bomb into space and managed to actually slow them down enough to land on the surface of the moon.
This was a victory for all of the world... not just the U.S. and it sure as hell wasn't a loss for the Soviet Union. The were able to see that their fellow man stood on the surface of the moon and be proud of what we can all accomplish and to know that if we reach for the stars... one day we might just reach them.
Screw your pathetic patriotic nonsense... every day I come here and read Slashdot and see people from all over the world (including Russia and China) talk about popular science together as a common species. I visit sites where people from around the world work to further medicine and we don't consider patents or national boundaries, we consider illnesses. We work together to design new algorithms for pattern detection within ultrasound images to detect anomalies.
I visit other sites where we discuss the mysteries of the Universe and generally find that we like those mysteries. Sometimes we wonder would we like it so much if they weren't mysteries. We speak as humans with no regards for national boundaries and who was squeezed from a vagina in a given place.
Patriotism is for fools. Nationalism is for fools. There is only one reason for national boundaries and that's to have some order to managerial tasks like deciding who should pay for which roads to be built.
I was born an American... when I learned that patriotism is a hoax, I decided to be something far greater... a human instead. My life has been far more fulfilling since.
That said... as someone born in New York, I do take an irrational pride in New York pizza and bagels... it's not a competition, it's an observation... we do it better.
Inflation isn't that high but there are lots of costs associated with such projects. These are not the same carriers purchased twenty years ago - look at the available tech that they can now stuff into one.
That does NOT negate your point about it being too pricey. It just means that the rate would almost certainly exceed inflation because they're not even similar products except they both float and launch planes - not even the planes are the same in many cases. Add in the amortized design changes and, yeah, it's gonna be more costly - tech that we have now simply was not available then. It is still, of course, too damned expensive because, honestly, we've got enough of 'em already and nobody else can even remotely compete with such a class.
We've won... We can trickle along with moderate improvements at much lower cost, at a decreased level of alertness, and be fine. Our military has lots of problems but our Navy is, very much so, far above any other blue-water force on the planet. Bar none.
That said, there's no real comparison between the two types of carriers. Even if we left the design largely the same, the amount of tech that was unavailable for prior inclusion would make it more expensive by default.
Finally, I wonder if the Russians are accepting anonymous donations? I'd throw a few bucks there way. I like space and I like Russia. I've donated to NASA before (I'll skip the novella) and that made me feel pretty good. Donating to Russia would be even more meaningful as they're probably able to stretch the Rubles further even after their administration takes their cut.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."