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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.
Greece is also thinking of landing on the moon "when their fiscal situation improves"
Because they are destined to die in a fiery crash on the moon so loud it can be heard here.
>> 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.
That's pretty much par for the course here in America too, comrade. In fact, if it wasn't for corruption, we'd probably not have any space program at all.
The aura that surrounds Vlad Putin will be focused by a series of unobtainium lenses and used to propel the cosmonauts to the moon where they will plant a Russian flag, set up a military base manned by space cossacks and claim the moon for mother Russia.
I stopped reading at (...and the costs of Vladimir Putin's imperial adventures in the Ukraine and Syria). Can we please stop with the propaganda pieces. I have much to do and don't want to have to look at ideological crap on /. Ok, rant off. FWIW, I think a permanent moon base should be very high on the priority list. It matters not to me who actually builds it. Chinese, Russian, EU,,, it doesn't matter.
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
astr vs cosm: Both are apt roots for the word.
...just to lift the cojones of the astronauts brave enough to be on that mission.
A lunar mission "on the cheap"? Eek.
-Styopa
This reminds me of an old Soviet headline about some event where the U.S. beat the USSR. The headline loudly proclaimed:
"USSR comes in second, USA is second from last"
This has always confused me also...
Soviet union never had any space spinoffs. That's only a US thing.
'Imperial adventures'? Despite America bombing just about every continent, we don't often see that language used to describe US agression. At least the Russians sem to have turned the tide against ISIS in Syria, something America failed to do, during their so far much longer 'IMPERIAL ADVENTURE' there.
Mr. Putin and his PR team does a great job of portraying Russia as a superpower however the sad truth is that Russia is slowly becoming a country of the poor where even most basic human needs are not met. According to the recent polls over 50% of the Russians living in Russia cannot afford buying normal food, like fruits, meat, fish or vegetables. No one is talking about caviar or exotic things.
Other areas where Russia is behind almost all developed countries of the world: medicine, economics, science, and even education. Cancer patients mortality rate is ten times higher than in most other countries of the world, because equipment is totally outdated and doctors' salary is so low, they don't bother to work professionally. Corruption runs so rampant no one even bothers any more - watch the movie "Chaika". Seen by 4 million people, it contains the facts which are impossible to refute, yet how many people from the state apparatus have been fired? Zero. In the past rabid Russian patriots, called "vatniky", claimed that Putin is clean and it's only his people who steal, bribe, and do all sorts of nefarious things. After this movie many of them changed their minds.
Don't believe the hype - even if Russia flies to the Moon, it will be done at the expense of the budget sphere or new insane taxes will be introduced (like the recent tax for long-haul truckers). Russians have already paid dearly for the annexation of Crimea and for the war in Ukraine (most countries in the world understand that this war is indirectly financed by Putin).
This country is doomed.
"Darkside: The Movie" (Yes, it will have "The Movie" in the title.)
The Russian space program is capable of getting to lunar orbit and back, but they're still years away from a lander. But if they "land" on the dark side, and all communication relayed back by the orbiter is encrypted, how will anyone outside their space program know where the footage they show to world was really shot?
Maybe they're really broadcasting from the moon, maybe they're faking the whole thing.
Nope, no sig
If you stacked all of Russia's grand plans to do cool stuff in space that never amounted to anything on top of each other, you could *walk* to the moon.
Yeah, because moving heavy industry out into space one day isn't something that would benefit the world as a whole..
You need a fire in the belly to go to the moon. When it comes to the moon, the Russians don't have it.
1) They don't just want to go to the moon, they want a permanent manned base. Like Mir or ISS, except not in orbit around Earth but on the moon. It's the next logical step.
2) They planned it for a long time now, but due to economic pressure/sanctions they're weathering the storm and putting it off for better times. Does anyone seriously doubt that oil prices will go up in the next year or 2? Is anyone seriously that naive? High oil prices is just icing on the cake, spending/beer money. They have enough to live on without it.
3) There isn't much financial investment in either Syria or Ukraine. Ukraine will fall apart nicely on its own, they just defaulted on debts (I was born there.....I follow the situation and have family/friends there, it's only a matter of time). Humanitarian convoys to Donbass don't cost that much, neither does supplying the region with ammunition from time to time. Crimea only needed a bridge and a power cable run to them, it's a matter of a few billion and a year or two that's about it. They literally have 1 base under 1,000 personnel in Syria, like 30-60 planes. It's not exactly budget breaking. Unlike Iraqi Freedom bs it won't take a decade, again a year or so. Syrian army does all of the ground work.
So if you notice a lot of these things come down to a year or 2...... Sounds like good time to wait a little for them.
An article or discussion in another forum of the Russian space program mentioned in 1990s is when they should have had lot of young people entering the workforce to start careers at Roscosmos, Energia, etc. However, they did not. So now there is an aging workforce including management (yes types are needed for organization and coordination of engineers and technicians) and nobody to replace their positions when they retire (or die). Though not surprising as Jim Oberg wrote an article in 1990s IEEE Spectrum about his visit to Baikoner, he was also free to roam around which was a huge change compared to just a few years before. Oberg described the place with lots of abandoned facilities but many 40 and 50-somethings still working there (and with meager wages) because they felt dedicated to the space program. Not many young people were willing to do that especially considering Baikoner is a bleak area to live [and not much of a nightlife].
Speaking of Putin, he has failed to match what his Soviet predecessors were able to do as we see problems of bringing the new launch complex at Vostochny.
mfwright@batnet.com
Possibly not. Certainly not in our lifetimes. However, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be good if it did.
Ukraine never called itself "The Ukraine". The official name of the country is "Ukraine". One major hint is the fact that "the" is an English article.
Neither the Russian nor Ukrainian languages have definite articles. You can't answer the question of whether the "official" name for Ukraine includes the definite article, since that's not even a meaningful question in Ukranian. "Ukraine" and "The Ukraine" are both equally accurate translations of the Ukranian word for Ukraine .
... 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. ...
And why beholdest thou the speck that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the log that is in thine own eye?
Energy production? Precious metals? Those two alone might make it worthwhile. I never said it was a guarantee. What's with your attitude?
Maybe when we get rid of "different name for astronaut depending on country", we can go to work on the much more pressing "different name for group depending on animal" problem. The Chinese could appoint a zu of taikonauts to work on that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Most people always build arbitrary borders in their heads about reality to soothe their feelings. This is yet another example. Actually, I'd use your statement of 'the cold war is over' as another example. Most people arbitrarily declared it over and the threat eliminated when the berlin wall fell and the soviet union was dissolved. Reality is more nuanced than that.
Wafflenauts
Table-ized A.I.
Moving 1000 tons of asteroid rock to near-Lunar orbit counts as heavy in my book. So does processing that rock to useful products.
You guys who arm-wave 3D printing always seem to forget you need spools of plastic filament or other material to feed the printer, and power to run it. If you supply those at more than hobbyist scale, it becomes heavy industry.
Have a read about self-bootstrapping industry in space: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/...
Having spent a career in aerospace, I think I'm qualified to answer your untutored questions:
> Send up massive amounts of material, to do something "heavy" in free fall
No, space industry is based on using materials already in space, the Moon and Near Earth Asteroids to start with, because it takes less energy to get them from there than from Earth. The first product is *fuel*, used to deliver and maintain the orbits of the 1250 active satellites in Earth orbit. After that comes maintenance of the satellites when they break. Lack of fuel and broken parts force the replacement of entire satellites, at a cost of billions a year.
> Or the massive amount of rocket exhaust would be just great for the environment?
The most efficient rocket fuel in general use is H2 + O2, whose exhaust is water. SpaceX's rockets use kerosine + O2, but they could probably be made to run on biofuels from plants.
> loonacies like Space Elevators
I taught a class on them last summer. They're quite feasible with proper engineering, which unfortunately the popular descriptions are not:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/...
> I'd bet you're a programmer?
No, a literal rocket scientist, as in advanced space propulsion for Boeing. Tom Murphy, the author of the articles you linked to, is an ivory tower academic. He has no idea about engineering and economics. I can do back-of-the-envelope calculations like he does in those articles, but I have an understanding of the field and which calculations are important. He does not.
I bet you didn't know the energy cost of reaching low Earth orbit (32 MJ/kg), at wholesale electric rates, is half the cost of potatoes/kg at the supermarket. We've just been incredibly wasteful and inefficient in how we go about it till now. If we could merely equal the efficiency of an average automobile, cost to orbit would be 2-3 times potato cost, which is trivial.
That was easy. This is Putin we're talking about.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Is that what you did when you said women can't be scientists? Or was that a different sort of mental fuck-uppery?
I didn't do that because I never said or implied that women can't or shouldn't be scientists.
Regarding WWII, an article (I'm too lazy to find the link) on "Losing A War" where author said just about everyone knows of WWII as it was the biggest war ever. They may associate places like Pearl Harbor, Berlin, and Hiroshima with that war but other places like Leyte Gulf and Stalingrad are becoming unfamiliar. There is the Normandy invasion or was it Normandy conquest? Did the boats go from France to England or the other way around?
mfwright@batnet.com
The "counter argument" is that you put words in my mouth and argued against those.
Disgusting.
You are also not man enough to take responsibility for what you have written, so cowardly as well.
Your "point" was to put words in my mouth that were not there, argue against them, and insult me on the basis of a statement I did not make.