Russia Pledges To Go To the Moon 197
An anonymous reader writes: Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, has announced it intends to bring humans to the Moon by roughly 2030. Russia plans a full-scale exploration of the Moon's surface. Agency head Oleg Ostapenko said that by the end of the next decade, "based on the results of lunar surface exploration by unmanned space probes, we will designate [the] most promising places for lunar expeditions and lunar bases.
I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon (Score:3, Funny)
I bet Vladimir Putin isn't man enough to leave next month and travel to the moon, then plant the Russian flag on the surface of it.
Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon (Score:5, Funny)
It's not an Invasion.
It's a humanitarian effort to bring supplies to the lunies.
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sorry guys watched iron sky with vlad now hes raving about moon nazis gtg my bad
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Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, has announced it intends to bring humans to the Moon by roughly 2030
In the USA, Astronauts WENT to the moon, but in Putin Russia, humans are BROUGHT to the moon.
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Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon (Score:5, Funny)
I bet Vladimir Putin isn't man enough to leave next month and travel to the moon, then plant the Russian flag on the surface of it.
Wouldn't work. When they show the picture of him planting that flag on the moon while not wearing a shirt everyone will know it was photoshopped.
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I mean they have technology to go to space, what else is stopping them to go right now?
It's a good question, one of which everyone would probably have their own answer, all of which could be refuted by many others. It's almost as if this question isn't supposed to be asked without meeting friction.
Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon (Score:4, Funny)
Incorrect. Putin would plant the flag, on the moon, shirtless, and the moon would explode from exposure to his supreme manliness.
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LOL ... since when did Putin replace Chuck Norris for that meme?
Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon (Score:5, Funny)
In Putin's Russia, Chuck Norris copied him.
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Chuck Norris doesn't need a stinkin' rocket to go to the moon, he just jumps.
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They have workable spaceship technology now- the delay ("by 2030") is to allow for research into transparent spacesuits for Putin and the bear he will ride while planting the flag.
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He would go, but all the extra Soyuz seats are currently occupied by American astronauts.
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...[U.S. astronauts] who pay for their seats using United States dollars. Many millions of U.S. dollars actually. (Of course these seats were probably agreed to under some form of contract well before the spectacular and glorious Sochi Olympics started).
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Well now he has to do it. And you know he's gonna do it shirtless.
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Considering the sheer amount of failures of Apollo program before its eventual success, all while program itself was consuming a gargantuan ~5% of US GDP at the time, I would wager this isn't a one month project. Especially when you consider that baseline space technology like rocket engines hasn't seen much development since 70s.
Re:I bet Putin couldn't go to the moon (Score:5, Informative)
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It was in the end. But like the most successful space projects, it required a massive amount of failures to succeed. In space exploration, success generally rides on tens, in some cases hundreds of failures. It's part of that particular field.
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"Continual development" without "replacement" for that long of a time tells you everything you need to know about how little development there has been in rocket engine technology.
Most promising places (Score:3)
It's odd. We just checked, but there's some kind of large metallic object and a flagpole blocking the best few candidate positions.
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Don't worry, those are just props.
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There have been so few because, as it turns out, the moon is a terribly uninteresting place with really annoying dust.
Re:Most promising places (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been so few because, as it turns out, the moon is a terribly uninteresting place with really annoying dust.
"Terribly uninteresting"? How quaint.
The moon is the single best opportunity for the expansion of space exploration.
Guess what? Rockets large enough to send out to the asteroid belt with people in them, as a practical matter, are too damned big to launch from Earth. Did I hear "build them in orbit"? Nope. Too difficult, slow, and expensive. At our current level of technology you really need gravity to do practical construction on a very large scale. 1/6 the gravity? Perfect! Rockets built there don't have to be very large at all.
The moon has vast natural resources; they merely need to be extracted from the rock. Oxygen is one of them. There is also a surprising amount of fissionable material available. So... given some initial energy and material input, you can probably have sustained output, without too much "resupply" coming from Earth. And while energy requirements of a colony might be high, there are vast amounts of solar energy available, and plenty of silicon and trace elements to make solar cells.
Etc., etc. Our current U.S. government administration might be clueless about these things, but in the long run, the moon is our greatest hope for the future.
Re:Most promising places (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm glad people like you exist.
No matter how unthinking and stupid I am sometimes, I will never, ever, ever say something as dumb as this argument is right now.
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Can you present proof that no one hasn't? Your the one arguing against the norm.
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Can you present proof that no one hasn't?
That sounds like you're trying to trick Pinocchio into lying.
Re:Most promising places (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. It won't matter though.
Here's a couple hundred pieces of evidence [wikipedia.org].
But that's not what you said.
What you said that was particularly dumb is the fact that no one is currently doing X is somehow evidence X never happened.
Re:Most promising places (Score:4, Interesting)
Even better - I'll let you collect your own: Get a nice powerful telescope and look at the moon, specifically the site of the "alleged" landing. See the flag? See the footprints? See the remnants of the landing module? If we didn't go to the moon that suggests that either:
1) Robotic technology of the time was far in excess of anything the public knew about, and we landed robots on the moon to walk around with a human-like gait
or
2) Those sneaky consipirators have managed to hack the lenses of every sufficiently powerful telescope on the planet to overlay a faked landing sight image when pointed at a specific point on the moon's surface.
Honestly I don't understand the popularity of this particular conspiracy theory - getting to the moon is basically pretty simple - shove a giant bottle rocket up your ass and hold on tight. Even factoring in the fact that you have to take a second bottle rocket with you to ride back home on it's not all that technologically impressive - by the time of the moon landing we already had pretty well worked out the engineering for making giant fucking rockets to rapidly deliver massively heavy bombs anywhere on the planet, and had used said rockets to deliver people to orbit and bring them down again, alive even. That's the hard part - energetially speaking once you've made it to orbit the moon is a lot closer than the Earth. You need to carry more rockets with you, but the only truly challenging engineering problem remaining is the whole vertical landing issue, and that's a far easier nut to crack on the moon than on Earth, thanks to the moon's much lower gravity and complete lack of crosswinds.
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I agree. And I'm also starting to think it's not even made of cheese.
I mean, come on! We saw no rats in any of the videos! Are they trying to convince us it's some kind of magical cheese that rats dislike? It simply makes no sense.
Re:Most promising places (Score:4, Funny)
There have been 29 Moon landings. Six manned, twenty-three unmanned. The US hasn't gone since then because, it's fucking expensive, and the pissing war with the Soviets ended. But even if they flew your dumb ass to the Moon and rubbed your face into one of the many footprints on the surface, you'd think up some convoluted way that they must of faked it.
Because that makes sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Finally, the USSR is back! Going to the moon while the economy is crumbling, foreign countries are invaded and human rights are being trampled.
Re:Because that makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Going to the moon while the economy is crumbling, foreign countries are invaded and human rights are being trampled.
Are you talking about the U.S. or Russia?
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Going to the moon while the economy is crumbling, foreign countries are invaded and human rights are being trampled.
Are you talking about the U.S. or Russia?
Russia, obviously.
The US is not going to the moon anytime soon with NASA's budget.
Re:Because that makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
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Isn't it amazing? An economy fueled by little more than energy exports, a population still in decline, an economic war with a bloc of nations whose GDP in a bad year dwarfs its own by almost an order of a magnitude... and yup, it's going to enter the moon race.
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If you really want some good high ground, park your weapon at a Lagrange point.
You can't do that - the TV transmitters are there!
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Re:Because that makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
>The ultimate high ground is certainly not the moon. Anything you lob at the Earth from there must first get out of the lunar gravity well, which would require a pretty significant expenditure of fuel.
Not really - the moon's gravity well is radically shallower than the Earth's, far shallower than the difference in surface gravity would suggest (the moon's surface is far closer to it's center, and thus gravity falls off far faster with altitude.) I can't be bothered to do the math, but if xkcd [xkcd.com] is to be believed the energy to launch a given rock from the moon launch would be about 20x lower than from Earth. Meanwhile that rock would have 20x more kinetic energy when it slammed into Earth than if it were being slammed into the moon.
More to the point the Moon offers shelter, concealment, an essentially unlimited supply of rocks to throw, and plenty of nuclear fuel as a root energy source. High ground involves more than just altitude after all - there's a world of difference between "having the high ground" and "being treed". If you're in open space you're pretty much treed - everyone can se *exactly* where you are, and you have no resources except those you tak with you.
As for lauching from the far side of the moon, that would probably be wise if you wanted to take your victims by surprise, and if you want to hit something specific you'll have to precisely navigate the non-trivial gravitational field of a binary planet regardless of where the launch point is, circling half way around the moon isn't going to make things that much more difficult when you're trying to throw a dart and hit a bulls-eye hundreds of thousands of km away across a constantly shifting gravitational landscape.
But then again, why would you need to take them by surprise? What good does it do to get a few hours warning that a city is about to be reduced to a smoking crater? You can't even begin to evacuate in that amount of time. At best you could try to intercept the incoming projectile with a high yield missile, presumably nuclear - in which case if you were successful then instead of vaporizing the city you end up covering the state with radioactive buck shot - after all blowing up an projectile doesn't significantly change it's trajectory. Plus that interceptor was probably a hell of a lot more expensive to build and launch than the rock it hit. Now multiply that by the fact that it's 20x cheaper to throw a rock at the Earth from the Moon than vice versa, and you get 20x the yield on impact, and the Moon has a 400x gravitational force multiplier on it's side. For every rock we could throw at them they could throw 400 smaller rocks back, each of which would do just as much damage as ours.
And of course they would have every bit as much warning as us about incoming projectiles crossing the 385,000km void - launch a missile at the moon and they can launch a cloud of gravel to intercept and destroy it. Make it heavy gravel and the interception doubles as a counterstrike.
Lil' Putin (Score:5, Funny)
Advisor: Your majesty, that is most unwise at this point in time. I think you
Vladimir Putin: Then I wanna invade Georgia!
Adviser: Your majesty, as you recall we tried that already and
Vladimir Putin: Then I wanna invade Ukraine!
Adviser: Your majesty, that is already in progress as your ordered on your birthday
Vladimir Putin: *looks around the dinner table for invasion inspiration* I wanna invade Turkey!
Adviser: Your majesty! What has come over you? You know you're limited by doctrine to one invasion per year!
Vladimir Putin: *pouts and looks out the window* I wanna invade
Adviser: *murmurs quietly with other advisers* And, you promise this will be the last invasion? This will use up all your invasion credits, you know.
Vladimir Putin: Yes.
Adviser: Okay then finish your peas and we'll make a press release tomorrow.
Vladimir Putin: But I don't wanna finish my peas! I hate you, I hate you! You never let me do anything fun! I wish I was never born!
Re:Lil' Putin (Score:4, Funny)
Why did I read the Putin lines in a George W Bush voice?
Re:Lil' Putin (Score:4, Insightful)
A nice summary of modern Western propaganda, sadly and a good show of just far out it is. Soviet Pravda was closer to the truth in its analyses at its prime time than our media is today.
When you consider that if Putin actually wanted to do what our pundits claim he wants to do, he would have easily done it. For example, Russian Army pointedly pushed all the way to the established border of South Ossetia and Georgia with incredible rapidity, pushing attacking Georgian forces out about as fast as they could flee and then the Russian Army stopped like it hit a wall, even through Georgian army's fighting capability was completely destroyed by that point and going to Tbilisi just meant moving the armour about a hundred kilometers more.
Same thing with Ukraine. If Russia wanted to conquer it, it would have already, back in February. Considering that they didn't directly attack even after Ukrainians accidentally (?) shelled some towns on Russian side, killing a few people, or after a few hundred Ukrainian soldiers crossed onto their side only to find that locals just invited them in, fed them and sent them back, it's pretty silly to suggest that Russians "didn't invade Ukraine because they couldn't".
The entire demonisation as "undemocratic" of the leader who enjoys more genuine democratic support among his people than most Western leaders are enjoying among theirs is telling of just how entrenched the ability of established order in our media to spread blatant lies is today, almost two and a half decades after the end of Cold War.
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Yes, comrade. Western propaganda is truly the most despicable of all. But they have Coca Cola and Adidas, and we have not.
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Russia "could" have done those things in the same sense that the USA "could" nuke Iran. It seems plainly evident that Russian aggression is being stopped not by the military might of Georgia or Ukraine but by the fact that Russia would join the "axis of evil" if they actually followed through with any such plans.
Putin does want to do those things. And he easily can do those things. However, the expected political fallout from doing those things is sufficient to discourage him from actually
Re:Lil' Putin (Score:4, Insightful)
The far more obvious reason why Russia has no interest in invading is the fact that its military resources are limited and it could only make one such invasion happen at best. And it has no interest in tying up its entire military capacity in such an invasion for decades.
Unlike US, it doesn't have the capability to invade and occupy multiple countries at once and still have significant military capability left over for maintaining other operations.
Last I checked, they still have a sizeable stockpile of nuclear arms. They "could" liberally nuke Georgia and Ukraine, thereby eliminating any ground opposition (and human population) in these territories and allowing them to annex them with minimal military commitment. It's not that hard to occupy a country when it's totally devoid of all life (and quite irradiated to match). The Tsar Bomba had a fireball radius of 4km and was capable of producing third degree burns 100km from ground zero, and it was only 50% of the max yield of a bomb of this design.
Of course, conversations like this (about what "could" happen) are ridiculous, as they ignore the reality of political factors being of primary consideration. Putin "could" do a lot of things, but talking about them as though they're remotely plausible isn't likely to yield any valuable insight into anything. That's the only point I was trying to make.
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Of course it is. The moment someone dares to point out the obvious propaganda in the Western media, he's a "Putin shill". The moment that same person points out the obvious propaganda in Russian media, he's "Obama shill".
You people are just tiring in the same countless rebuked claims, like that "Putin admitted to military operatives in Crimea", "Crimean vote was rigged", "There are fascists in power in Kiev", "Polish are openly attacking Eastern Ukrainians" and other propagandist bullshit.
All of these claim
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Your Majesty? Putin's not a King. He's not the ruler of a kingdom. Nor is he a Prince, not being the ruler of a principality.
He's just in charge of a country.
Have they seen the Apollo 18 footage yet? (Score:4, Funny)
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yah, cause we proved our point! 'Merica.
We choose to go to the moon... (Score:5, Insightful)
"We choose to go to the moon in the next two decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they will take attention away from what's happening with the Ukraine." -- V. Putin
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It's Ukraine. Regimes change like the weather in other places. If you don't like the one now, all you have to do is wait awhile. It will change soon enough.
They're like the Iraq of the former USSR.
No grand conspiracies are really needed. Although that doesn't stop Putin from going out of his way to make it look like there is one.
Rather vice versa (Score:2)
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But not Ukraine. It's chaotic, yes, but free and democratic as hell.
LOL. You couldn't be further from the truth. They have a "free market", sure, I'll give you that, but it's a free market in the American sense. Quality of services and products do not matter beyond some bare minimum, as friendships, kickbacks, manipulative marketing practices and sheer piles of money have orders of magnitude more influence than anything else. They have such a free market that you can't even buy proper food in many places, because nutritional content is a rather expensive thing and it's been
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There were exactly two coups in entire post-Soviet history of Ukraine which encompasses 23 years of history. First one was early one, and after that every single regime change (until the last one) was through massive dissatisfaction of masses with incumbent powers enacted through the democratic process.
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"Russian puppet" was actively pushing for its own country's benefits by pitting EU and Russia against one another in what essentially amounted to a bidding war. I recommend actually familiarizing with Yanukovich's actions and why Russian leadership didn't attempt to seriously push to reinstate him as a result. He was anything but pro-Russian, as his tough bargaining significantly reduced Ukrainian gas bill and he was negotiating actually good terms from Ukraine's point of view with EU instead of total econo
In Putin's Russia (Score:2)
Moon lands on you!
So wait (Score:2, Troll)
And think - the Apollo space program came up in approximately seven years. The Russians are going to take sixteen years to do theirs. Best wishes! I wonder if they'll salute the American flags we've left behind?
Re:So wait (Score:5, Insightful)
And, they will correctly point out that you've not been there in decades and are resting on your laurels.
Want to impress us? Beat them there again.
Otherwise you're just reliving glory days.
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we already beat them there 6 times! how many, times do we need to "do it again?"
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Once.
Just once more, to again inspire the children of the world for a generation.
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Why would you put a fuel depot on the moon when there are perfectly good places to put an orbitting fuel depot that doesn't have a pesky gravity well to deal with?
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Many years to catch up? Seems to me we managed to pass them in just eight years.
As to "way ahead for several years", if you look at the details, they were about a year ahead for several years. They stopped being ahead considerably before the aforementioned eight years were up.
And what's with the Russians taking 16+ ye
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'All over' is relative...and last I checked the US didn't even have the capability of getting astronauts to their own* space station much less the moon.
It's pretty pathetic how far backwards we have slid in some regards. The /original/ space race took 14 years to land a man on the moon and now they're aiming for roughly the same time frame to do it again?
Re:So wait (Score:4, Interesting)
The Russians are going to take sixteen years to do theirs. Best wishes!
Pretty much, but I doubt they'll actually go. Sixteen years out is a pretty long time to take. I bet they don't even up their space spending this year. ...or the next. Sixteen years from now will be somebody else's probably rather than Putin's most likely. My cynical take is that it will go exactly where all of Bush's talk in each Presidential address about going to Mars went, nowhere past the news reporters.
All they need is some money (Score:2)
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Great plan. Now all they need is 10 consecutive years of oil prices above $200/barrel to finance the enterprise.
Or... stop invading neighboring countries. One or the other.
Militarization of the Moon (Score:5, Insightful)
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If the U.S. wants in on the party...
Party? A large empty fine-sand pit of nothing to do? Nothing to build with? In order to militarize the moon, they'd have to build everything out of glass, or move all of their military components to the moon. Although it's been attempted before, it took 7 failed missions. I mean, at least preparations A through G were a complete failure...
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Maybe we should build a space station and man it continuously and learn tons about spending months at a time in space. I know, we'll talk to the Russians! We'll call it the "International Space Station!" It'll be awesome!
You know what would be really awesome? We should send a bunch of rovers to
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At the bottom of a gravity well? Check. Ages of warning that an attack is incoming? Check. Horribly fragile base where any crack in your pressure dome will kill you? Check. Something tells me the moon will be as militarily relevant to a battle of earth as control of the ocean floors. If you want to get spectacular, I'd rather go out to the asteroid belt and find a suitably big rock (read: not a dino killer, not just a light show) you could aim at earth. The timing had better be just right though, if you're
War over the moon's resources is inevitable (Score:2)
I can't wait to kill commies with a rave gun [youtube.com]!
Cooling Relations = More Spaceflight (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like the cooling relations between the US and Russia are already resulting in a lot more spaceflight initiatives. It's a shame that we cannot "yearn for the stars" out of wonder instead of conflict and competition.
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The problem being that none of the countries alone likely has the resources for deep space exploration. Some sort of cooperation will be required, especially as it became apparent with ISS that US has a massive lead in some technological aspects and Russia in others.
.. but what about the return trip? (Score:2)
Been there, done that. Move on. (Score:2)
Got the T-shirt (Score:2)
Well that escalated quickly (Score:2)
But seriously, Putin, if you leave Earth, don't come back.
Good luck with that (Score:3)
The aliens on the dark side won't like that one bit. They made deals with the U.S.A., not Russia.
Great idea (Score:2)
They could establish a gulag there and ship prisoners to it. Then have them grow wheat to be sent back to earth. And have a warden run the whole thing with the aid of a sentient computer named 'Mycroft'.
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They could establish a gulag there and ship prisoners to it. Then have them grow wheat to be sent back to earth. And have a warden run the whole thing with the aid of a sentient computer named 'Mycroft'.
Riiight! And lasers can whistle!
NASA's budget will now explode. (Score:3)
sounds like the past four US presidents (Score:2)
"Interantional Moon Base 2030" (Score:2)
Thank you, Mr. Putin (Score:3)
NASA will now get more funding and we will see more space exploration.
Russians pledge to got to your mom (Score:2)
why is it always 20 to 30 years away? (Score:3)
After they "went" to Ukraine, (Score:2, Insightful)
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Putin revealing his masterplan of placing a giant laser on the moon and having a maniacal laugh...
Nothing James Bond can't fix...where is Roger Moore these days...
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Or generating them ;)
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Immediately after noticing from any place on earth a weapons launch from the moon a laser beam of sufficient energy from the earth might be able to destroy the slow moving moon launched weapon. The speed of light is very high. Of course if the moon based weapon is a laser beam, well, things would be different.