Russia Wants To Establish a Permanent Moon Base 313
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."'"
Fine.. (Score:5, Funny)
...just don't let them put nuclear waste up there. You don't want it to rip itself out of orbit.
Re:Fine.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Fine.. (Score:5, Funny)
That's what we said about 1984.
Re:Fine.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Fine.. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm waiting to blame Obama's successor for the lack of a 1999 moonbase.
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Obama has really turned the tables.
I think it was wrong to go into Iraq, more so for the reason(s) given. But a show of force is never a bad thing.
China said it was going to set up a permanent base on the Moon, a week later the U.S. is once again on the lets go to the Moon band wagon. This lasted as long as there was the "money was no object" attitude of the U.S. people.
With the with problems in Ukraine recently. Obama's weak and harmless "conditions
So.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It would appear that Tea Party Politics are a form of infectious disease, and it's spreading to Russia. Does anyone have the time to tell Capt.PutPut that the USSR, and the Space Race are over?
I dunno, from here, it looks like he's attempting a Soviet Reunion.
Hope he can get the original drummer when he 'gets the badn back together'...
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Does anyone have the time to tell Capt.PutPut that the USSR, and the Space Race are over?
Why would these be over? I mean, I'm all for telling him that just for fun, but he'll just respond "not yet, but soon, mwahahaha", or equivalent thereof.
Shoot for the moon.. (Score:2, Insightful)
The Crimea is significantly less costly.
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No. Living standards in teh Ukraine are significantly below those in Russia, and the Crimean was one of the poorest parts of the Ukraine. Before the referendum, Russia has promised to raise pensions and salaries of state employees to in the Crimean to russin standards. This will cost them billions. With the troubles and embargos, the Crimean will not generate much income: Economically, it relied on tourim and agriculture. Now there are no tourists any more, and the can't sell their Crimean sparkling wine to
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There isn't enough rubles in Moscow (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:There isn't enough rubles in Moscow (Score:4, Funny)
That explains why the government is always trying to defund them.
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> Essentially ALL doors made nowadays have a cardboard core.
All doors that poor people buy, that is. Quality is still out there, and as available as it always was, you just have to be willing to pay for it.
This is an internal door, it's not like it needs to be sturdy. Then I realized: the only time you would need a solid oak door for a bathroom.... is the little boys room at the Vatican. (I'll be here all week folks!)
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Actually, even the quality stuff has gotten a lot cheaper over the years. It's just that manufacturers figured out even cheaper ways of making low-end goods, most of which are "good enough". A low end composite interior door is $22, solid core is $199; it's hard to pay much more for an interior door (unless you go for glass).
And... rich people tend to buy the cheap stuff; that's how they get rich in the first place.
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better than wasting trillions on pointless wars (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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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.
Re:There isn't enough rubles in Moscow (Score:5, Insightful)
If Russians have the will to go to the moon, then they are miles ahead of us. The American people, and especially the American politicians, lack the will.
Perhaps you would like to debate the ultimate weapon now?
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Re:There isn't enough rubles in Moscow (Score:4, Interesting)
Your view, and mine, are diametrically opposed. To me, there can be nothing more important than getting mankind established in places off the face of the earth. We have plenty of evidence of big rocks striking the earth in the past, and we have plenty of evidence of major extinction events. Throughout all of our history, we have kept all of our eggs in one basket. We need to distribute our eggs into as many baskets as we possibly can.
There are reasons to dislike Russia's government - but this is one great reason to salute and respect Russia's government. I support any and every effort that can possibly result in distributing those eggs.
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First infiltrate with masked astronauts (Score:5, Funny)
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You missed a step...
3: Have popular vote
4: ?????
5: Profit
There ya go ;-)
Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
We can say anything about their government, but we can't say that they are not really ambitious.
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Russia signed a specific agreement with Ukraine [wikisource.org] (and with Georgia and other FSRs) in order to get them to give their (formerly Soviet) nuclear arsenal back to Russia, that Russia would "respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine", "refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine", etc etc.
Putin violated that agreement. Every former Soviet republic knows that Russia won't honour any agreements, and that they all
Re:Russia (Score:4, Informative)
The legitimately elected pro-Russia government in Ukraine was overthrown in a coup. From Russia's point of view they came in to help those people who had had their democratic government taken away from them by force. Since there is no legitimate Ukrainian government now (elections in May) prior agreements with that government no longer stand.
I'm not saying I agree completely with all that, but people seem to forget that there was a coup and the people of Crimea asked for Russian assistance. The country was broken before Russia came in.
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My:
"There was a huge amount of corruption and fraud in the previous election."
Similar thing just happened in Hungary. Ruling part got 47% of the vote, but is claiming 2/3rds "supermajority" of the seats. Allowing it to pretty much make any legislative and constitutional changes it wants. All thanks to corrupt rule changes and probably election fraud. Expect protests.
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"Yes it was a coup d'etat. A coup does not have to be a military one. Every illegal usurpation of the government is a coup."
Yes you're right, but there was nothing illegal here. The democratically elected parliament voted for early elections and to impeach the president after deciding to support the will of their constituents (the Ukrainian people). That's not illegal by any measure, therefore, it wasn't a coup.
It was more akin to the parliament voting to impeach the president and then resigning themselves.
Crimea, Kosovo & Srpska (Score:3)
Or better example - Kosovo. There was no vote there either - Albanians just moved in & possessed it, and the US supported them & bombed Serbia over Kosovo, and finally recognized its independence. What Russia did in Crimea was a lot more legit than what the West supported in Kosovo.
At the same time, 'self-determination', which is so important for the Albanians, doesn't apply to Bosnian Serbs in Srpska.
Talk is cheap (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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
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"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...
Re:Talk is cheap (Score:5, Informative)
Craft but not people.
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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)
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.
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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.
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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.
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This is a Poe's Law post if every there was one.
Is this guy serious or being over-the-top satirical?
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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! =)
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While true, that statement isn't particularly useful since it's also true of pretty much every government program everywhere.
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Re:Talk is cheap (Score:4, Interesting)
First we had an omnipotent Bush who took blame for things that happened long before he became president. Now, we have a super-omnipotent Obama.
Obama was a young punk, still wet behind the ears, when the United States decided to scrap all it's moon and deeper space capabilities in favor of a dumb ass space plane concept. A shuttle was a pretty cool idea - as a means to an end. The shuttles should have been there to service the REAL exploration efforts. But, instead, the shuttle program became an end, in and of itself, and the larger programs were simply ignored, and filed in the circular file.
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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.
Coca-Cola rejoices! (Score:2)
Annex? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Tell that to the Crimean
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Tell that to the Crimean
Sure, because trampling over a neighbor's backyard is the same as going to the fucking moon.
Point being made is, it was 'illegal' for Putin to annex Crimea.
He did it anyway.
Re:Annex? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
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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]
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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)
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)
.
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Anga and rah rah rah flag waving? (Score:2)
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
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So who has the launcher and is capable of manned missions then? Not NASA is it? Instead of cheering for something broken why not hassle elected officials to stop breaking it.
Your "nationalist" shit is way off the mark because I'm not European and NASA paid for part of my engineering degree back in the 1980s - I really want to see them succeed but political corruption has reduced them to a few skunkworks projects hiding between slabs of pork. The effort to produce
Sensationalism (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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.)
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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.
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You first. Parent said:
The U.S. did not have a mission to Mars program in the 1980's. I know it's Slashdot, but you could at least read the post before trying to scold someone for not reading it.
Isn't the point of going to the moon... (Score:2)
...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?
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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
Just tell them.... (Score:2)
...that Ukraine is there already!
Note the 'Wants to ..." (Score:2)
"Wants to
Propaganda much? (Score:2)
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)
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.
Stupid is as stupid does.... (Score:2)
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
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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.
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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
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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
Fine (Score:2)
As long as the commander is named Koenig...
A human base on the moon (Score:2)
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
The Second Moon Race? (Score:2)
Putin's cover is officially blown... (Score:2)
It's becomming more and more clear that he's an actual supervillan. Does he have a white cat?
Does not Computin... (Score:3)
In communist Russia, base moons you!
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on the moon?
Actually, Putin has been watching western propaganda films, and has other intentions there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]
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I can't be sure what the previous poster was disagreeable about, but every one knows monkeys throw poo, not rocks
Re:The Moon is a Harsh Mistress comes to reality.. (Score:4, Funny)
Unless they were eating rocks.
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Re:The guy is demented... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If the US economy crashes again all he has to do is wait and that will come true.
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The question is what would they do for air? Remember producing enough breathabler air was a flop for Biosphere2.
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Has the Sci fi story been written wherein the great nations of earth inevetibaly go to war to unceremoniously control the moon?
John E. Stiers' 'Lunar Republic' series.
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Russia isn't pulling out of ISS. They're in it for the long haul, and they haven't been shy about making that unambiguously known. When NASA announced a tentative schedule to deorbit the ISS at the end of its planned service life, Russia IMMEDIATELY said it would regard any attempt to deorbit the ISS as an act of war. The Russian modules were built (at higher cost) to be serviced and refurbished indefinitely in space, and they fully intend to keep it up there until they literally don't have the ability to k