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Russia Cancels All Moon Missions Till 2025 (sputniknews.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the do-it-later dept.

schwit1 writes: Faced with a shrinking budget and poor economic conditions, Russia has once again trimmed back its proposed ten-year space plan for the next decade in space, canceling all Moon missions until after 2025. Russian might now have a giant government-run aerospace corporation, but flying space missions is not really its primary task. Like all government agencies divorced from profit and loss, its primary task is really to provide pork barrel jobs, regardless of whether those jobs do anything useful or not. Thus, Russia will have a very expensive space program for the next decade, but the money spent will not accomplish much of anything new.

3 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. No story bias here... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nice unbiased "story". It's always fun to read the editorials at Slashdot.

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
  2. Aerospace is National Security by Hardhead_7 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not that the Russian government isn't incredibly corrupt and wasteful, but this is actually probably what you'd want to do. If your economy is tanking, you'd want to continue to put *some* money into aerospace for as long as you could to retain talent and prevent you from having to rebuild it from the ground up later. Maybe not enough to do big ambitious projects, but you'd want aerospace on "idle" for when (hopefully) the economy improves.

    I mean, NASA stopped building big rockets that went to the moon and "just" went into low earth orbit for a few decades, and they're *still* basically back at square one when it comes to building Saturn V-sized engines. Imagine if aerospace had been completely shut down.

  3. Keep your opinions to yourself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do we really need the juvenile editorializing like you did in the line below?

    "Like all government agencies divorced from profit and loss, its primary task is really to provide pork barrel jobs, regardless of whether those jobs do anything useful or not."

    Really? REALLY? Grow up and get some street smarts. The real world is far different than what you state above.

    Stick to the news until you have a clue how the real world works. Is there waste and port barrel jobs in government? Absolutely. But that's the primary task of all government agencies? Jeesh. /. out to require a basic understanding of high school civics to avoid your kind of childish, pollyanna thinking.

    And meanwhile, the OP ought to spend some time around the countless government agencies and people who work very hard and succeed in making all of our lives better. It would be a real eye-opener.

    Signed,

    First time poster after hundreds of hours over years of lurking.