Russia Adding $50 Billion To Space Effort 130
An anonymous reader sends news that Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled today a new $50 billion effort to maintain and extend the country's space capabilities. Part of this initiative is a new spaceport located in Russia, which will lead to the first manned launches from Russian soil in 2018. Manned launches currently originate from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
"The Russian space programme has been hurt in recent years by a string of launch failures of unmanned probes and satellites, but Putin vowed Moscow would continue to ramp up spending. He said that from 2013-2020, Russia would be spending 1.6 trillion rubles ($51.8 billion, 38 million euros) on its space sector, a growth far greater than any other space power. 'Developing our potential in space will be one of the priorities of state policy,' Putin said at a meeting in the regional capital Blagoveshchensk. ... speaking to Canadian spaceman Chris Hadfield, currently commander of the ISS, Putin hailed cooperation in space which meant world powers could forget about the problems of international relations and think 'about the future of mankind.'"
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Inflation (Score:5, Informative)
($51.8 billion, 38 million euros)
Am I missing something, or has the exchange rate really gotten that bad for the dollar?
According to this converter [likeforex.com] it is 39.6 million - but the same ballpark
a "Billion" in the US isnt the same as a "billion" in the EU. Most euro countries use the term "Billion" to mean a million million, which is the US "Trillion".
Not that it makes it right, since a Million is the same in the US and EU. They should have said "38 thousand million euros" or "38 milliard euros".
Re:the summary is more appropriately (Score:5, Informative)
If you're comfortable in the European and Russian history, then you would know that it did work in many aspects!
1) It modernized the country in the industry and politics. What they performed was a forced shift from an economy based on agriculture to an industrial one.
2) It "freed" the population from the land completely, and first the party managers, and now capitalist oligarch can rule them by wages.
3) The zone of interest of the USSR expanded to reach even other continents, and even our huge satellite, so one has to admit it, that this is no little accomplishment for a country, that was ruled by Father Tzar not even hundred years ago.
This is no small feast for capitalism because after all, by all means, it was explicitly capitalist country since the '20s [wikipedia.org], and even before the policies were that of a failed war-economic ones. Capitalism doesn't need free market, in fact, it only holds a certain illusion of "free" market anyway. Free markets in capitalism are always deemed to transform in to monopoly playground, which seizes the political system. In the case of the USSR however, it was the inherited bureaucratic structure that produced capitalism where there was little. If you take your time, and look up the ideological genealogy of Bolshevism/The Communist Party, you'll find that in fact, they were no more than a rather extreme version of social democracy, and communist/anarchists/radicals of all sorts were systematically eliminated, imprisoned, forced out of the country. Stalin's re-interpretation of Marxism-Leninism (that this radical social democratic theory, the top-down approach to the working class and communism as a Party led process, instead of a revolutionary movement) were only slight changes, in order to make the Soviet-Russian imperialism "acceptable", as the USSR external image as the agent of internationalism (which is, in many ways, just the same ol' lie creepily similar to the USA's line of bringing about liberty and democracy - both means that expanding the zone of military-political-economical interest).
For all intents and purposes, the USSR produced super-wealthy class, who at some point dissociate themselves from the ideological facade, broke away even from the illusion of managing this wealth in the name of the people. Economy isn't something of being good or bad. It is a tool in the hand of the powerful. In economic crises it is always the most wealthy who survives the transformation, those who actually create policy... economic policy.
The space race sent me to college (Score:5, Informative)
When I went to high school in the 1950s, we were were in an arms race and a space race with the Soviet Union.
A bunch of clever educators -- here and in the USSR -- used the the arms race to get broad support for science education. That was the easiest time I can think of to get a good education without too much money. Some of the best colleges, like CCNY, were free. The state university systems and land-grant colleges were almost free. They had to be. We were competing with Moscow University.
None of this bullshit about going into debt for the rest of your life to pay for college tuition. I got scholarships. Go read the autobiographies on the Nobel Prize web sites. Lots of scientists say they never could have afforded to go to college if it wasn't free.
They were spending money on basic science then like they're spending money on the military today. And there was a lot of spillover into the rest of education.
The Democrats and Republicans were competing with each other to see who could spend more for scientific research. They put a lot of money into basic research -- and it worked.
The one thing the Soviet Union did well was their education system. Talk about German rocket scientists. How many Soviet scientists and engineers came here during the 1980s? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Brin [wikipedia.org]
If competition is good, the Soviets were the best competitors we could have had. America would probably be better off if they were still here.