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Moon

Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base 313

Posted by samzenpus from the one-of-these-days-Alisa dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Having established its presence in the Crimean Peninsula, Russia is now shooting for a bit loftier goal, a permanent Moon base. 'As reported by the Voice of Russia, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told the government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta that establishing a permanent Moon base has become one of the country's top space priorities. "The moon is not an intermediate point in the [space] race, it is a separate, even a self-contained goal," Rogozin reportedly said. "It would hardly be rational to make some ten or twenty flights to the moon, and then wind it all up and fly to the Mars or some asteroids."'"
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Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base More

Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base

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  • Fine.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by MickyTheIdiot ( 1032226 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @05:30PM (#46742757) Homepage Journal

    ...just don't let them put nuclear waste up there. You don't want it to rip itself out of orbit.

  • So.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Hsien-Ko ( 1090623 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @05:31PM (#46742761)
    Battlezone?

    • Re:So.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by homey of my owney ( 975234 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @06:30PM (#46743097)
      No. Putin views things in black and white. Just like his pre-perestroika predecessors. He views this exactly as they viewed the race to the moon in the 60's. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, but as any Russian will tell you - once KGB, always KGB

  • Shoot for the moon.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fred911 ( 83970 )

    The Crimea is significantly less costly.

  • There isn't enough rubles in Moscow (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @05:33PM (#46742783) Journal
    Good luck if the contractors are the ones who built roads and infrastructure for the Sochi Olympics.
    • Yeah no kidding, did you see that athlete that was locked in a bathroom and punched his way out the door? The door was basically cardboard.

    • better than wasting trillions on pointless wars (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 13, 2014 @06:43PM (#46743159)

      What did US achieve with all that money and lives. It alienated us in the world stage and achieved nothing of value in the end. Ike was right:

      "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by poity ( 465672 )

      Not to mention Russia does not have, and has never had, a moon capable launch vehicle (inb4 N1 explosion pictures), which means if the US has to pretty much start again from scratch to get people to the moon, the Russians are even further behind.

    • At least there shouldn't be any stray wolf wandering within the Moon base..

  • First infiltrate with masked astronauts (Score:5, Funny)

    by Steve1952 ( 651150 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @05:36PM (#46742803)
    Is plan: 1: First infiltrate with masked astronauts without insignia. 2: Build government offices, and seize them. 3: Have popular vote 4: Profit!

  • Russia (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kyusaku Natsume ( 1098 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @05:38PM (#46742813)

    We can say anything about their government, but we can't say that they are not really ambitious.

  • Talk is cheap (Score:5, Informative)

    by Brett Buck ( 811747 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @05:42PM (#46742841)

    Every few years, one of the Russian aerospace companies presents a new "plan" to go to Mars, colonize the moon, teleport to the Sun (at night, of course), etc. All they need is a few billion or so to get it going. It's slightly more credible that that letter you got from the Nigerian prince.

            I expect that given many tens of billions of dollars, and a few decades, the Russians could manage to do most of these proposals, but there is no intent to actually do any of them aside from a neat-looking study.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by stoploss ( 2842505 )

      I expect that given many tens of billions of dollars, and a few decades, the Russians could manage to do most of these proposals, but there is no intent to actually do any of them aside from a neat-looking study.

      Okay, let's say you're correct and that the Russian space program is a sham with overly inflated goals. Where does that leave the US space program, given that we have no way to even get to LEO without begging for a ride from the Russians?

      I have given up on NASA and their "designed by committee, for maximum pork" launch systems that cost $1+ billion per launch. Maybe SpaceX will make something man-rated soon and then our country's space program won't be such a joke anymore.

      tl;dr: I'd rather we had the Russia

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        "Okay, let's say you're correct and that the Russian space program is a sham with overly inflated goals. Where does that leave the US space program, given that we have no way to even get to LEO without begging for a ride from the Russians?"

        Uhhh... When did you ever get the idea the USA couldn't go into LEO? The USA sends craft into LEO dozens of times per year.... Not sure how this gibberish gets modded +5 insightful on slashdot these days...

      • Okay, let's say you're correct and that the Russian space program is a sham with overly inflated goals.

        I don't think he said that, I think he said one particular part of the Russian space program is like that.

        Which is a lot like the US space program.

      • Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Insightful)

        by thoth ( 7907 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @07:25PM (#46743363) Journal

        All these problems you attribute to NASA are actually congressional problems. NASA budgets are are the chopping block every year. The only way they get stuff passed is by distributing the work to every Congress member's districts. That's fucked up as you would expect, but we're a country that doesn't give a shit about funding science, paying scientists very well, or even listening to scientists. In fact there's a whole industry around discrediting climate scientists, since that threatens corporate profits, and a huge number of adults Americans don't believe in evolution. Entertainment and sports are the heroes and finance is where the big bucks are.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dbIII ( 701233 )

          All these problems you attribute to NASA are actually congressional problems

          That's been obvious since Feynman threw a spanner in the works of a whitewash that tried to hide that, yet those problems have worsened. So far the current low point was some twenty something catamite of a powerful Republican being rewarded for his services by getting put in charge of a major part of NASA and forbidding any publications about climate change.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Arker ( 91948 )
        That's what you get when you let the government get involved.

        We should have never created NASA to start with, we'd be at least 50 years ahead with a real (commercial) moonbase by now if we'd just let idiot millionaires shoot for the moon in peace.

        • This is a Poe's Law post if every there was one.

          Is this guy serious or being over-the-top satirical?

      • We're back to where we were

        Whilst I agree wholeheartedly with your post I'm still in shock at seeing the above (grammatically correct) sentence on slashdot, apostrophes and all! =)

    • The companies with these proposals need to send some of their men to the United States so that they may learn how to lobby a government.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      So Russia is pretty much the same as the US then, that has been going back to the Moon and then on to Mars since the mid 70s.

      Russia managed to commercialize space far earlier than the US did, which is kinda ironic. It's a shame because the US has the money and the skill to do so much, but does so little and uses the whole thing as a political football. Back in the 70s it managed to hook up with the Russians in orbit, now it won't even let the Chinese join the ISS project.

  • They'll finally get a suitable billboard! It's been forty years overdue already.

  • Annex? (Score:5, Informative)

    by mbone ( 558574 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @06:03PM (#46742961)

    Russia has no plans to annex the Moon. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty makes this legally impossible, and common sense shows that it could never (or, at least, not for a good long while) be enforced.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Tell that to the Crimean

    • Re:Annex? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Deadstick ( 535032 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @06:27PM (#46743085)

      I'd put a lot more reliance in the difficulty and expense of the enterprise than I'd put in the Russians honoring treaties...

    • Re:Annex? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kierthos ( 225954 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @07:18PM (#46743321) Homepage

      Yeah... you know, back when Ukraine broke off from Russia, they made a deal with Russia over Ukraine's nukes. Basically, when Ukraine declared independence, they had what amounted to the third largest nuclear stockpile in the world.

      In exchange for turning over all their nukes to Russia, Russia agreed not to interfere with Ukraine's territorial integrity. (Translation: If you voluntarily turn over your nukes, we won't mess with your new country.)

      Fast forward from then (1994) to now, and oh look, Russia ignored that treaty in seizing the Crimea region. So color me particular unwilling to believe that if Russia gets a moon base that they won't try and ignore that treaty if it suits them.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Uberbah ( 647458 )

        Yeah...American Exceptionalists. It takes some serious chutzpah/willful ignorance to accuse Russia of violating Ukraine's sovereignty while ignoring the long term efforts of the west to subvert Ukraine's democracy and install a sufficiently capitalist regime, all of which predated any moves from Putin.

        U.S. officials met with the junta before they seized power, are on tape picking Ukraine's leaders, and braged about spending $5 billion to give the country "the future it deserves" - in front of banners for C [youtube.com]

    • Russia also signed a treaty pledging to respect Ukraine's sovereignty and existing borders. We've seen how well that turned out.

    • Re:Annex? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @08:24PM (#46743605)

      The 1967 Outer Space Treaty makes this legally impossible, and common sense shows that it could never (or, at least, not for a good long while) be enforced.

      If they put a base there, and noone else can even go there, then they pretty much de facto own the moon.

      It's not, after all, like anyone can do anything to stop them from doing whatever they like up there - noone else can even get to LEO reliably***.

      ***: the Chinese can get up there (once every couple years or so). And SpaceX Dragon is going to be undergoing man-rating tests later this year (proving that the escape mechanism works, among other things) and next year so that it can be man-rated. Once that happens, NASA won't be dependent on the Russians, they'll be dependent on SpaceX....

  • There are no Earthlings (Score:3)

    by RevWaldo ( 1186281 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @06:04PM (#46742965)
    Just temporarily embarrassed space explorers.

    .

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Von Braun's body is a mouldering in the ground so you aint got the moon no more.
      The USA had their chance and is not showing any sign of taking another one. There's no point being a sore loser when the game has been given up on. The Russians are at least still trying even though they've had more economic problems to slow them down than the US had when Nixon sidetracked NASA into being a pork factory that could only get anywhere via skunkworks hiding between the slabs of pork.

      Instead of bitching about othe

  • Sensationalism (Score:5, Funny)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @06:42PM (#46743143)

    Russia doesn't want to establish a moon base, but they're obligated to step up and protect all the Russian speakers on the moon. Moreover the moon is historically Russian, not only did a recent referendum establish that 98.3% of the moon wants to join Russia, but the moon is so close that on a clear night you can actually see it from Moscow!!

  • Russia wants a lot of things. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by goodmanj ( 234846 ) on Sunday April 13, 2014 @06:45PM (#46743165)

    Russia's manned space program basically consists of announcing plans to do amazing things, which come to nothing as they keeping on doing the same stuff they were doing in the 1980s. As opposed to the U.S. manned space program, which consists of making plans to get back to the stuff they were doing in the 1980s, which come to nothing.

    (Unmanned is another story.)

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )

      Russia's manned space program basically consists of announcing plans to do amazing things

      Like Bush's Mars announcement followed by cuts?
      OK then, almost nobody took that seriously but that idiocy did happen. Maybe it's the same story in Russia with this, an empty statement setting a goal for somebody else to do the hard work if it ever happens.

  • ...to eventually launch a vehicle from the moon to get to Mars? With less gravity on the Moon it would take less fuel to launch and escape gravity, right?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )
      That's one point. Another is we know buggerall about the moon and have only sent one geologist for a few days.

    • Landing on the moon and taking off again adds 4km/s delta-v to the energy cost of going to Mars.

      Plus launching from lunar orbit into Mars transfer orbit is less efficient than launching from LEO directly into MTO, due to Oberth inefficiencies.

      The net effect is that there's no benefit from using the moon as an intermediate step, unless the cost of manufacturing fuel on the moon is vastly less than the cost of launching it from Earth into LEO. However, the equipment cost for mining, purifying, and electrolysi

  • ...that Ukraine is there already!

  • Also in the news, "Kittenman wants to win the lottery".

    "Wants to ..." and "had definite plans on how to ..." are worlds apart.
  • ""Having established its presence in the Crimean Peninsula"

    Like this was recent.

    Crimea has been Russian since 1783.

    For my fellow Murricans, that was 7 years after our Declaration of Independence, 4 years before our Constitutional Convention, and 17 years before we moved the Federal Capital from Philadelphia to Washington.

    Just so you know.

    • Re:Propaganda much? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FatLittleMonkey ( 1341387 ) on Monday April 14, 2014 @03:01AM (#46745019)

      Ethnically, it wasn't Russian until the 1940's when Stalin deported (and murdered) a shitload of locals and trucked in Russian-speaking replacements.

      Before that, it was no more Russian than India was "English".

      Putin apologists are weird. Russia signed an explicitly unambigious agreement to respect Ukrainian sovereignty and existing borders. Putin violated that agreement. It's not complicated.

  • Going to the moon is expensive AND pointless. You have to do everything you do in Earth orbit, but it has to happen farther away from safety and at the bottom of a gravity well. There's absolutely nothing of value on the moon that couldn't be gotten cheaper by snagging bits off of a water bearing comet, or bringing that same water or up from Earth, for that matter, or mining a few local asteroids in-situ.

    Look, gravity is *bad* and expensive. You don't go looking for it. You simulate it a bit with centrifuga

    • Going to the moon is expensive AND pointless. You have to do everything you do in Earth orbit, but it has to happen farther away from safety and at the bottom of a gravity well. There's absolutely nothing of value on the moon that couldn't be gotten cheaper by snagging bits off of a water bearing comet, or bringing that same water or up from Earth, for that matter, or mining a few local asteroids in-situ.

      Look, gravity is *bad* and expensive. You don't go looking for it. You simulate it a bit with centrifugal force when necessary, but that's all.

      Keep in mind that all the exploration of the Moon so far is like taking a detailed analysis of a single grain of sand from a beach and declaring that 'nothing of value is on Earth.' We haven't come close to any statistically meaningful samples yet.

    • Helium 3 is up there. I think that's the isotope that's supposed to be good for fusion.

      Besides that, all the talk of going to Mars IMO is a silly and dangerous technological leap. Right now, the most isolated humans who've ever lived (not traveled) in space are a day away from rescue. Lets deal with the challenges of setting up shop somewhere slightly more remote before building a Pluto base (kidding). It's far more feasible to pull off and would probably lead to permanent settlements. As it is, going

      • Helium 3 is up there. I think that's the isotope that's supposed to be good for fusion.

        Helium-3 fusion is more difficult than deuterium fusion, so we'll likely have deuterium fusion first. One of the waste products of deuterium fusion is He3; and you can increase production artificially by adding lithium linings to deuterium fusion reactors. OTOH, the amount of He3 in the lunar soil is infinitesimal. It will always be vastly cheaper to produce it artificially on Earth. Hell, it's probably cheaper to produce it artificially in deuterium reactors on the moon, than it would be to mining it from

  • As long as the commander is named Koenig...

  • Perhaps they have read my work. From http://dollyknot.com/nonlinear... [dollyknot.com]
    How do we get the whole thing off the ground?

    I read of a beautiful idea in a scientific magazine called Omni. It suggested the use of virtual reality systems to control robots on the moon. This would enable us to build the first colony more efficiently because robots need only raw energy. We send a rocket to the moon, on the rocket we put machine tools and intelligent systems, with which can build both more machinery and the

  • With the CWII (Cold War 2) approaching, we may as well see a second moon race.

  • It's becomming more and more clear that he's an actual supervillan. Does he have a white cat?

  • Does not Computin... (Score:3)

    by fey000 ( 1374173 ) on Monday April 14, 2014 @03:30AM (#46745127)

    In communist Russia, base moons you!

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