Slashdot Mirror
How Russia May Send Cosmonauts To the Moon After All (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: When Russia decided to abandon its drive to land cosmonauts on the moon, the reasons were not so much political than they were fiscal. The low price of oil and the costs of Vladimir Putin's imperial adventures in the Ukraine and Syria had crowded out funding for Russia space missions. It did not help matters that the Russian Space Agency was rife with corruption and mismanagement that seems to prevail across much of Russian society. However, Popular Mechanics suggests that Russia is still thinking of landing cosmonauts on the moon when that country's fiscal situation improves.
That's pretty much par for the course here in America too, comrade.
I'm guessing you don't know any Russians and haven't read very much about Russia. The kind of corruption the poster is talking about isn't the standard conflicts of interest present in the American military-industrial complex (and that of pretty much every advanced nation), it's more like where petty officials are stealing parts to resell on the black market, government jobs are purchased, and no deal gets made without money changing hands beneath the table. Not even the worst of the old-time big-city Democratic Party machines had corruption anywhere near this pervasive.