Russia Hopes For Its First Successful Lunar Landing Mission in Nearly 50 Years (theguardian.com) 143
Russia hopes to launch its first successful lunar landing mission for nearly 50 years, with a long-delayed takeoff from the far east of the country scheduled for early on Friday morning that the Kremlin aims to tout as a new achievement in space exploration. From a report: The Luna-25 mission will seek to land near the south pole of the moon, collecting geological samples from the area, and sending back data for signs of water or its building blocks, which could raise the possibility of a future human colony on the moon. But the more immediate goal is to prove that Russia still can launch a lunar landing mission after numerous failures in the past, generations of turnover among its scientific experts, delays due to sanctions and now isolation due to its war in Ukraine.
Post-Soviet Russia has launched two failed space landing missions, the Mars-96 in 1996 and Phobos-Grunt in 2011, both of which crash-landed into the Pacific Ocean. "The Russian Federation hasn't had much luck with launching unmanned interplanetary probes," said Vitaly Egorov, a blogger who writes extensively on space exploration. "Now 12 years later they're launching Luna-25 and the main intrigue is whether or not it will succeed in reaching [the moon] or not, and if it does, can it actually land there? "One of the main goals is to let modern specialists put down space probes softly on celestial objects. They haven't had that experience in 47 years. That knowledge needs to be restored for new specialists on a new technological level."
Post-Soviet Russia has launched two failed space landing missions, the Mars-96 in 1996 and Phobos-Grunt in 2011, both of which crash-landed into the Pacific Ocean. "The Russian Federation hasn't had much luck with launching unmanned interplanetary probes," said Vitaly Egorov, a blogger who writes extensively on space exploration. "Now 12 years later they're launching Luna-25 and the main intrigue is whether or not it will succeed in reaching [the moon] or not, and if it does, can it actually land there? "One of the main goals is to let modern specialists put down space probes softly on celestial objects. They haven't had that experience in 47 years. That knowledge needs to be restored for new specialists on a new technological level."
Hoping for another small reef in the Pacific (Score:3, Insightful)
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This is perhaps the first time in my life I've wished for a space mission to fail.
Russia can go fuck itself while it's busy raping Ukraine and destabilizing the world's food supplies. There are no excuses for what they've done - only transparent lies and propaganda. And anyone who is ignorant or dishonest enough to swallow Putin's spooge can go fuck themselves as well for being part of the problem.
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+1 couldn't agree more...
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It's all in his head. Conspiracies all the way down.
Re: Now that "Drumpf" is out of office, we can put (Score:2)
"Exactly what was claimed the Russians were doing."
The difference is that Russia is a foreign adversary. HTH HAND
Science vs Propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)
Science can survive the loss of this mission, so for propaganda's sake I hope it fails miserably... While bleeding Russia's resources to impair their invasion of Ukraine.
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Science can survive the loss of this mission, so for propaganda's sake I hope it fails miserably...
To the contrary, I'd like to see more of Russia's effort and resources going toward stuff like this, instead of showing off their military by invading neighboring countries.
While bleeding Russia's resources to impair their invasion of Ukraine.
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I was trying to stick to realistic options.
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Maybe they can get their newest bestest pal China to slap a russian flag on their next moon mission....
I cannot imagine any other way this will happen
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I don't know exactly what they did with Ukraine, but I wouldn't qualify it as "showing off their military"
Re: Science vs Propaganda (Score:3)
Yeah normally I cheer for any country launching a space mission but I make an exception for this one.
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TAKE THAT PUTLER!
Re:Science vs Propaganda (Score:5, Informative)
There is a difference between a country that has nothing to lose and a madman running it that has nothing to lose.
I have a hunch that nobody actually WANTS to die for the clown.
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Science can survive the loss of this mission, so for propaganda's sake I hope it fails miserably... While bleeding Russia's resources to impair their invasion of Ukraine.
Yeah, there's nothing like a nuclear-capable nation getting backed into a corner with nothing to lose...
... except another nation's territory?
Oh noes! Something terrible has happened to me! I lost your wallet and now I must stop at nothing to recover your wallet and your credit card PIN!
If you leave me no choice I'll be forced to beat you senseless to get them!!
Re:Science vs Propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, and appeasement worked so well with Germany... surely they would stop after being allowed to take over... yet another neighboring country
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By the time the Germany's reunited, they absolutely learned their lessons.
Russia still needs to learn its lesson. Maybe it will after breaking apart, who knows?
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Russia needs to bombed back to the stone ages, and all KBG/FSB officers executed. Only then does the country have a chance at living in reality.
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Careful there, we remember well what became of Germany after WW1.
Don't try to destroy Russia. It was what Clemenceau tried with Germany after WW1 and it gave us WW2. Lead it to democracy and a rule of the population.
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Too late
USSR self destructed, and like post-WW1 Germany, the people got suckered into giving the reins over to a psychotic schmuck
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USSR blew up. That's right. The psychotic schmuck is still the one before what Hitler was in Germany. A government everyone was glad to be replaced by someone who promised old greatness and a return to power and order.
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Sorry, but I am not in the slightest bit afraid of Russia.
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Right now? No. Not really. A few ingredients are still missing to give it Nazi Germany's volatile mix.
But ponder this: An indoctrinated generation of 18-25 year olds in positions of control who will live, fight, kill and die for their beloved Führer, a madman at the helm that would want to take the world with him if he has to perish (this is pretty much what we had at the end of WW2) and now add a few thousand nukes to that mix.
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I think fearing those nukes is being pumped up and used as a propaganda tool to ensure inaction on our part. And the Russian people are terrified into silence. They are not what we have to fear.
Re:Science vs Propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)
Russia needs to bombed back to the stone ages, and all KBG/FSB officers executed. Only then does the country have a chance at living in reality.
This mentality that bombing a country senseless is somehow a good idea just never sits right with me. Take out the leadership, build some diplomatic ties to the people themselves, help them set up their own new government, and maybe it wouldn't be a repeating cycle every few years/decades. But nope. Bomb and replace leadership with another madman in the making that's our puppet today and our enemy tomorrow. It's worked so well for us in the middle east!
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Take out the leadership, build some diplomatic ties to the people themselves, help them set up their own new government, and maybe it wouldn't be a repeating cycle every few years/decades.
Won't work. Russia has been led by a strong man since Ivan the Great in the late 1400s. They like it that way and won't tolerate anything else.
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Every dictator's excuse. It's that kind of thinking that kept the entire world enslaved for 15,000 years.
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Bombing worked for Germany though. That and the trials of their government officials.
The problem is not just the leadership in Russia. While most Germans now do not like Hitler or the 3rd Reich, a lot of Russians consider Stalin to have been a good leader (even though he was hated at the time) and the USSR to be a good country. In fact, according to them, Russia is still an Empire, just with some of its lands (Poland, Ukraine, the Baltics, part of Germany) temporarily occupied by the West.
I wonder what woul
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Some targeted bombing is probably in order, but the idea that the populace needs to pay for being led around by madmen for the last few centuries just isn't a very enlightened approach to turning a people toward better behavior.
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Whatever the West did with Germany during/after WW2 worked. Germany became democratic and the majority does not want to return to those times.
Whatever the West did with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and some other countries did not work, those countries are full of terrorists and not democratic.
As for Russia... Maybe actually losing a war would make them think and snap them out of their mindset. Or maybe not, after all the "I may not have a proper toilet, but I am part of a vast empire, people fear us, that mean
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The West did two major things for Germany after WW2
The Marshall Plan [wikipedia.org]
The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative enacted in 1948 to provide foreign aid to Western Europe. The United States transferred $13.3 billion (equivalent of $173 billion in 2023) in economic recovery programs to Western European economies after the end of World War II.
Denazification [wikipedia.org]
Denazification (German: Entnazifizierung) was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, cultu
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Whatever the West did with Germany during/after WW2 worked. Germany became democratic and the majority does not want to return to those times.
Whatever the West did with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and some other countries did not work, those countries are full of terrorists and not democratic.
As for Russia... Maybe actually losing a war would make them think and snap them out of their mindset. Or maybe not, after all the "I may not have a proper toilet, but I am part of a vast empire, people fear us, that means they respect us" mindset is just too difficult to break.
A lot of this stuff I hear repeated over and over again sounds like outsiders buying the propaganda pushed by the ruling class over there. I think deep down most people just want to live their lives in peace, and the assumption that just because the leaders of a country are assholes, everybody living there are assholes too is just way too groupthink / go-team oriented to make sense to me.
I've been told by several foreign acquaintances that they assume, until they actually meet a few folks, that all American
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I have actually met some Z-people.
My country was occupied by the USSR for almost 50 years (and was occupied by the Russian Empire too). There are quite a few personal anecdotes going around.
Here is a video of a Russian guy (who is against the war) describing his interactions with a Z-person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The video is long, but the main part is about 30 minutes, after that he answers questions from the chat etc.
I think deep down most people just want to live their lives in peace, and the assumption that just because the leaders of a country are assholes, everybody living there are assholes too is just way too groupthink / go-team oriented to make sense to me.
Of course, there cannot be accurate statistics on who really supports the war
Re: Science vs Propaganda (Score:2)
We need to do those things at home first.
The economy is collapsing in real time.
The numbers of poor and homeless are growing, personal debt is growing, this cannot persist. It WILL fall.
The US is looking more and more like Nazi Germany. And we are looking for strong men...
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I wonder how effective the Russian propaganda machine is. If the Russian people were liberated, would they welcome their liberators?
The war has probably helped us there. It's impossible to hide the fact that someone's son, someone's brother, is dead. Just having the troops come home with war stories might be enough.
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The Russians didn't embrace Putin, he took control in a coup, on the second attempt. Russia's former leader, Yeltsin was just a weakling for not executing them all. The Russian people we happy with democracy, as flawed as it was, in the short time it lasted.
Besides, bombing worked great for the Nazis. It think it's the only way for a brainwashed population to accept that their leaders are liars and weaklings, to see them crushed like bugs and their lies exposed without the chance to regroup. America in
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I wouldn't call Russians "Europeans" when discussing this with anyone in an EU country, especially in central Europe or the Baltic states. To them, Russians are not Europeans - certainly not these days, and probably not for a very long time to come. They barely acknowledge Russians as humans any more. I'm not sure those of us in the west/US can understand their hatred of all things Russian right now, unless you're paying particularly close attention to the war. They're busy tearing down Soviet era monum
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Oh, Russians deserve all the hate that's coming to them, and lots more. I'm just saying Russians are culturally a lot closer to European than Asian. Even Russians think of themselves as Europeans, and always have.
Re:Science vs Propaganda (Score:5, Informative)
Here, since you didn't get this lesson in home schooling:
THE BRITISH POLICY OF APPEASEMENT TOWARD HITLER AND NAZI GERMANY [ushmm.org]
Appeasement is a diplomatic strategy. It involves making concessions to an aggressive foreign power in order to avoid war. It is most commonly associated with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in office from 1937 to 1940. In the 1930s, the British government pursued a policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. Today, appeasement is usually regarded as a failure because it did not prevent World War II.
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That is a Risk/Reward judgement call, "Is it worth getting shot/stabbed to prevent somebody from stealing a $10 whatachmacallit"
The stakes shift considerably when WW2 resulted in the deaths of 70-85 million people as a result of appeasement
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WW2 resulted in the deaths of 70-85 million people as a result of appeasement
There's no telling that WW2 resulted because of appeasement. It may have happened even without it. I'm not saying appeasement was the right thing to do, but it does have its place. People do it all the time to each other with success. Pick your battles.
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We are talking about Putin and his attempts to cow the rest of the world into accepting his attempts to expand the russian cleptocracy across Europe, Asia and the Middle East while letting his buddies use the stolen money to purchase assets in America...
trying to compare it to stopping a shoplifter is disingenuous as best
Bart : Uh, say, are you guys crooks?
Fat Tony : Bart, is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family?
Bart : No.
Fat Tony : Well, suppose you got a large starving family. Is
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YES, because the result is MORE SHOPLIFTING and crime all around. Cops stop minor crimes all the time.
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>>Cops stop minor crimes all the time.
The tears in my eyes from laughing are making it hard to type a reply
You are joking... yes?
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Are YOU joking? Or just trolling?
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I would sure love to live in whatever Mayberry RFD you live in, but in my large metro area, the primary concern for police officers is self protection, beyond that they are good for deterrent (they make most money from off-duty overtime that is mandated by permitting laws), but actually stopping a crime in action involves emptying their magazines at the perp and a whooooole lot of paperwork, so they usually park somewhere noticable and wait for a call to show up and document a traffic accident or aftermath
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So a cynical oversimplification of what cops do passes as hard truth for you. A bit childish.
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It passes as hard truth better than your childish oversimplification that "Cops stop minor crimes all the time.", and I am not even being remotely cynical
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Oh, and here is a citation: Police are not primarily crime fighters, according to the data [reuters.com]
(Reuters) - A new report adds to a growing line of research showing that police departments don’t solve serious or violent crimes with any regularity, and in fact, spend very little time on crime control, in contrast to popular narratives.
The report was published Oct. 25 by advocacy group Catalyst California and the ACLU of Southern California. It relies on county budgets' numbers and new policing data provided u
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What does ANY of this have to do with "Cops stop minor crimes all the time?"
You're acting like a child. Did a cop touch you as a child, or do you just spend way too much time on youtube?
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Hilarious
If you had bothered to read it you would have found that 70-80% of self reported police activities are random traffic stops
As Angryman77 noted, these are attempts to generate revenue through fees and civil forfeiture
The article went on with the self reported data showing less than 20% of their time going into any investigation of an actual crime
"Stopping" any crime in the act is not even mentioned, just 11% of their activities involving "reasonable suspicion"
Of course, the police departments simply
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I'm not arguing against ANY of this. But not one bit contradicts "Cops stop minor crimes all the time."
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No, individual citizens are in fact not nation-states. You actually do treat these two entities as different things.
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The space race didn't do in the USSR. It was the internal contradictions all summed up by one bright spark who said: We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us. Lies all the way down screwed the USSR and is screwing Russia now.
Need a distraction desperately? (Score:5, Insightful)
From a 3 days war that's heading into its 3rd year?
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Apparently, those US sanctions haven't exactly "crippled" their economy like we thought they would.
If they can still launch rockets into space, the Russians are doing better than expected.
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Russia is broke. Until recently it tried to prop up the Ruble by buying foreign currency, that ended recently. The Ruble is now at 1:100 with the USD. And falling. Dramatically [xe.com].
Re:Need a distraction desperately? (Score:4, Interesting)
the US has a 32t deficit. We're quite literally living on credit; calling Russia broke is slightly disingenuous.
Now, It might involve talking with those subhuman swine that you would probably like to see genocided -- but ask a Russian how much the sanctions actually hurt them, and you might be surprised.
Meanwhile food/energy prices in the US and Europe, how have those fared since the sanctions?
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Credit towards whom? If you borrowed money from your own citizen you didn't really get any poorer.
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It's easy to pump money into the population and subsidize certain goods like gas and power. Some European countries with populist governments do the same, mostly Hungary and Poland. Prop up the expenses your population has so they don't complain... but that means living on borrowed time. And money. Because sooner or later you have to pay the price.
And I doubt that they can.
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This is simply not how national economies work.
Stop using household analogies. Your children do not pay you taxes.
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Mate.
Your emotional dislike of taxes is not an economic philosophy. Your observation about insurance being inadequate to stop disasters is obvious, other people who aren't management already understand that.
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and yet again, not an answer in sight.
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I'm not doing your school homework for you
The fact i'm shaking my head at your bad math and willing to tell you doesn't actually make me responsible for your unwillingness to learn.
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it's okay to be a pretentious nitwit. So kudos to you for leaning into it.
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Okay my smug little economist, how does it work then?
If you want a household analogy, it's like a kid (the government) borrowing from their dad (the populace), against the kid's future allowance. This analogy is imperfect, because the kid has to pay interest on the debt and the kid also gets to set their allowance, at least within reason (kid can't set the allowance too high or dad will refuse).
That's about as close as you can get to a household finance analogy without going so far from the reality of how fiscal and monetary policy works that your analogy i
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But, regarding this moon-thing, the Russians have a long history of announcing things that never happen. They haven’t landed anything on the moon recently, and I wouldn’t bet on their success this time around. Their scientific establishment is completely wrecked and their engineering expertise isn’t looking particularly good either.
And b
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And you do realize that the left-winger in the Presidential office has done just as much as others to force the isolation right? You started to make some good points, but you lost serious credibility when you started to use such foolish and polarizing terms.
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LOL, you think that a Democrat in America is a Left-winger?
fuckin rubes
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I have been told that Digital Equipment Corp would engrave stuff like "check six" on their VAX CPUs because they knew the russians were copying them
Many years later I worked with russians who were trained on russian VAX knock-offs
Truth is better than fiction at times
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If they can still launch rockets into space, the Russians are doing better than expected.
I have rockets in my garage that I bought five years ago and I'm sure they'll go up if I light the fuse. Similarly, Russia has a lot of aerospace hardware built prior to the war, which probably mostly works 60% of the time. You don't plan and execute a lunar lander mission in a moment - this activity must have been kicked off _years_ ago and has been largely unaffected by the sanctions because all the required hardware was bought before they were instituted. And all the people who are getting paid to finish
Denazify the moon (Score:3)
Re:Denazify the moon (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of the old joke.
"General, horrible news! The Russians are on the moon, and they painted it red!"
"Send up a space ship with white paint and have it paint "Coca Cola" across it"
ROTFL! (Score:2)
Good luck with that Russia. Lol.
Landing? (Score:2)
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Special lithobraking operation.
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I suspect a russian lunar mission will end with regolith-braking
Moon's farther away than Ukrainian kindergartens (Score:2)
Re:Ukrainian excuse (Score:2)
They will just blame Ukraine for it crashing into Kyiv and dirty bombing the city due to it's need for a nuclear power source.
Old hat (Score:2, Insightful)
They made it old hat, 50 years ago. Today we need a lunar base. Not a pussy ass lunar gateway shit, but a real god damn bona fide eat-a-fat-dick level certified moon base.
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I give up. Why do we need a lunar base? The views? All the minerals that are too expensive to ship back to Earth? A way station before we send Elon on his way?
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A lunar base is mostly interesting as a prototype for a Mars base. There isn't that much interesting stuff on the Moon, and because the nights are so long it's not really worth being down there for more than a couple of weeks at a time.
It's a very difficult environment too. Unlike Mars where there is weather, on the Moon there is nothing to wear down the regolith. It remains extremely sharp and rapidly destroys equipment, including space suits and rovers. Even the light is extremely harsh due to there being
India vs. Russia to the lunar south pole? (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't the Indian launched Chandrayaan-3 doing the exact same thing? Maybe a bit better since their lander has wheels.
"The mission is scheduled just shortly after the launch of India’s Chandrayaan-3 space probe, which entered the moon’s orbit earlier this week, according to the Indian Space Research Organization. The probe includes a lander and rover, which will also explore the water-rich area near the south pole of the moon."
It would be nice to have the Indian one succeed and then have the rover drive over an inspect the wreckage of the failed Russian one
i hope (Score:2)
Real objective... (Score:2)
Far east of the country? (Score:2)
Launching from the far east of russia because it's out of range of ukrainian drones...
Good luck to russia (Score:2)
Re:They aimed for the stars (Score:5, Informative)
One should maybe remember that the original engineers that got Russia into space were Ukrainians.
Re:They aimed for the stars (Score:5, Insightful)
One should maybe remember that the original engineers that got Russia into space were Ukrainians.
You misspelled "Germans".
Re:They aimed for the stars (Score:5, Informative)
Sergei Korolev [wikipedia.org]
Born 12 January 1907 [O.S. 30 December 1906]
Zhytomyr, Volhynian Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
Yuri Kondratyuk [wikipedia.org]
Born Aleksandr Ignatyevich Shargei
21 June 1897
Poltava, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
Re:They aimed for the stars (Score:4, Informative)
Koroleva's daughter Nataliya Serhiivna recalls: "The very word Ukraine was pronounced in our family with trepidation, with great love. My father spent his childhood in Nizhyn, he was born in Zhytomyr, lived in Kyiv, Odessa. My father spent the first 24 years, almost half of his life, in Ukraine. He loved her very much. He loved Ukrainian songs and the Ukrainian language. That's true. "I'm looking at the sky", "Roaring and moaning the Dnieper is wide" - favorite songs of my grandmother and father.”
— Source: Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
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Re:They aimed for the stars (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, not really.
Korolev was already an accomplished rocket scientist long before the Russians abducted German rocket engineers. Sure, they helped a lot, but Korolev was already working on rockets long before they had German "help" (read: prisoners).
Re: They aimed for the stars (Score:2)
Actually the engineers were taken by the Americans, leaving technicians to the Soviets.
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Well, not all of them. Some were actually taken in by the Soviets.
Re: They aimed for the stars (Score:2)
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The soviet landed automated craft there and retrieved samples. They never sent a manned craft.
But this was the soviets, not just the russians. Other soviet states contributed significantly to the space program, especially ukraine and kazakhstan.