Russia Plans Its Own Moon Base

Socguy writes "After being rebuffed by NASA, Russia now plans to build its own moon base by as early as 2027. The nation now plans to send a manned mission to the moon by 2025 and establish a permanent base shortly thereafter. 'According to our estimates, we will be ready for a manned flight to the moon in 2025,' Roskosmos chief Anatoly Perminov told state news agency RIA Novosti. A station that could be inhabited could be built there between 2027 and 2032, he said. While Russia will be refurbishing existing spacecraft, the U.S. is taking a different approach after the space station is finished and plans to scrap the space shuttle program in favour of a new kind of spaceship to be called Orion."

But...

[Tablizer]

...do they have the technology to fake it as well as we did?
     

Re:But...

[ScrewMaster]

...do they have the technology to fake it as well as we did?

I dunno ... I guess it depends upon what kind of export restrictions are on Photoshop.

Re:

[forkazoo]

...do they have the technology to fake it as well as we did?

Go watch Daywatch.

Now, the Russians may not be able to come up with a plot I find comprehensible, but they certainly have the visual effects technology to beat anything made in America in 1969. :)

Obligatory

[Stormwatch]

In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to YOU!!

Re:

[Eudial]

... but does it run Linux?

Re:

[xENoLocO]

In soviet russia, all dr evil lasers... hmm... no...

In soviet russia, all our laser are belong to dr evils moonbase!!

Jeez... did that even make sense??

I saw Moonraker!

[rts008]

Can you efficiently make vodka on the moon, or would it have to be sent there?

Maybe 'Moon Vodka' could be a money making thing for them....Oh well..."Budem zdorovy!" *tosses back shot of vodka*

Re:I saw Moonraker!

[yaphadam097]

Since potatoes grow well with hydroponics, seems like they would make a good choice for moon food. It takes a lot of potatoes to make vodka (And it's not how the Russians prefer to do it... potato vodka is more of a Polish thing.)

The real question is how much would a bottle of moon vodka go for if you could find a way to get it back to Earth?

Re:

[gawdonblue]

I doubt they would even bother trying to get vodka, it'd be so much easier to get moonshine.

Re:

[tsa]

It is easy but it will taste like cheese.

Don't NASA even know their own history?

[Rogerborg]

Project Orion was nuclear powered spacecraft [wikipedia.org]. Are their Marketdroids really so bereft of imagination that they couldn't think of another name for the STS replacement?

Re:

[njchick]

Project Orion have never came to the completion. Nuclear spaceships have never flown. Orion was just a codename, and codenames are commonly reused in later products. Think Mozilla and Seamonkey.

Re:

[clarkcox3]

Nuclear spaceships have never flown.

Ever hear of Voyager, Pioneer, Galieleo, Cassini, Viking, Apollo? All of those missions used nuclear power for their electrical systems.

Re:

[tgd]

Orion was never a NASA project.

Re:

[Rogerborg]

It didn't start as a NASA project, but it wasn't 'never' a NASA project, even if they only adopted it in order to kill it. Given your UID, you're probably a geezer, so I'll cut you some slack for not knowing how to look that up on the intartubes.

Re:

[tgd]

It was never a NASA project -- it was a General Atomic project and was slowed significantly by funding issues and eventually killed by the nuclear test ban treaty.

So saying NASA doesn't know their history is being a bit unfair to NASA -- I'm sure everyone there knows what Orion was, but also know at no point was Orion a NASA-funded or NASA-affiliated project. It never got much beyond the design stage, some micro-yield nuclear devices aside.

And I don't need to search the intartubes to know the Orion history.

Re:

[ColdWetDog]

And we're the ones that should point this out?

Gimp.

Gnu

Blender

And bog knows what else [tipotheday.com].

Re:

[eli pabst]

Space Shuttle? That's creative.

And that just barely beat out "Orbit Bus"! Though in retrospect they would've had people lining up to be on the maiden voyage (OB-1).

September 13th 1999

[zakezuke]

Boom

Whalers on the moon :)

[Killjoy_NL]

Drat, couldn't find the whalers on the moon part from Futurama.

I'll just post Bender's Moonsong instead.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Odmt2HTjwrE [youtube.com]

Luna-cy

[DynaSoar]

The Russians first said it was their idea not to participate:

RIA Novosti, 25.05.2007
"No plans to join NASA lunar program - Russian space agency"

Five days later BBC said Interfax carried the claim that the US turned them down:

BBC News, 30.04.2007
"NASA 'rejects Russia Moon help'"

The same day NASA said it didn't turn down Russia because it never got an offer:

New Scientist Space, 30.04.2007
"NASA denies that it has received any proposal from Russia to conduct joint moon activities, despite media reports to the contrary."

Four months later CBC ignores NASA, quotes Interfax, and credits RIA Novosti:

CBC News, 31.08.2007
"Spurned by NASA, Russia plans its own moon base"

Not content to sit still with this mere confusion, CBC includes in their article a graphic from AP with a caption that contradicts the "spurned" claim:

"NASA has said it will establish an international base camp on one of the moon's poles"

Did Russia misread this, leading them to send a mission to the north pole to claim it for themselves? Or was that just one more piece in this grand conspiracy to drive the Canadians slowly crazy, and to see if we could get them to send people to the north pole?

I suspect the following accounting (also 30.04.2007) to be as accurate as any of the others:

"A reporter from TheSpoof.com was sent forthwith to find out why but no one at NASA was willing to discuss the issue. All he could glean was that they would be taking a replica of the original Moon Lander with them, presumably for some kind of celebration.

After our intrepid reporter arrived back to TheSpoof.com offices, he was contacted by someone who wouldn't leave their name but simply stated that "there are no plans to take a replica Moon Lander as there is already one up there"

Mr Perminov said "personally, I think they do not want us to get to the Moon first, because they don't want us to find out that they didn't really get there in 1969 and that the whole thing was filmed on a sound stage in Nevada"

Re:

[iamlucky13]

I had the same comment. NASA did not "rebuff" Russia. Since they released the Global Exploration Strategy [nasa.gov], NASA has been pretty clear they're interested in international cooperation on the moon.

However, what they don't want is an exploration plan where our program becomes largely dependent upon other nations ability to meet their original committments. As a result, they're not looking to cooperate specifically on the Constellation program. NASA wants to develop the Constellation, get some actual hardware

Re:

[DynaSoar]

I hope it was clear enough that my comments about CBC were intended to be humorous, though they came from actual events. I agree that CBC is a pretty good news source. They've replaced BBC on my list of realiable and minimally biased reporting.

Russian engineering vs US science...

[fantomas]

Well it will be a pity if the world's big countries can't collaborate on this - and leave a space at the table for the Chinese too while you're at it - but it does strike me as a little ironic that the Americans are rolling up their sleeves to re-invent the Apollo spacecraft as the big step forward. Hand crafted solutions vs Russian mass production again? Presumably it will be a whole lot cheaper for the Russians, who are still turning out Soyuz same as they ever were, to tweak an improved model a bit. I suppose the earlier Russian (Soviet) plans were based on quite a bit of hardware which is tried and tested (apart from the N1 rocket).

I have to say it's all a bit disappointing that the biggest vision that the Americans can come up with is an updated version of the kit they were using 50 years ago. The romantic in me had hoped that even if the only way to get to planets is in disposable capsules, maybe we'd have come up with some reusable craft for the hopping between the planets and their satellites. That way we might get to use it a few times on the Earth-Moon shuttle and maybe even have a go at looking at Mars...

Re:

[DerekLyons]

it does strike me as a little ironic that the Americans are rolling up their sleeves to re-invent the Apollo spacecraft as the big step forward. Hand crafted solutions vs Russian mass production again?

At 81 flights in 40 years, the Soyuz (capsule) is hardly in mass production.

Presumably it will be a whole lot cheaper for the Russians, who are still turning out Soyuz same as they ever were, to tweak an improved model a bit.

Huh? Production and flight rate of both the Soyuz (capsule)

The Moon is a big table

[khallow]

Well it will be a pity if the world's big countries can't collaborate on this - and leave a space at the table for the Chinese too while you're at it - but it does strike me as a little ironic that the Americans are rolling up their sleeves to re-invent the Apollo spacecraft as the big step forward.

The Moon is a big table. Plenty of room for everyone. And I don't see the value of cooperation here. If a moon base is so expensive and difficult that only the combined efforts of multiple nations are necessa

Re:

[evilviper]

Well it will be a pity if the world's big countries can't collaborate on this - and leave a space at the table for the Chinese too while you're at it

Design by committee, and lowest common denominator is bad. That's why the ISS has been such a mess.

While you're suggesting a big international government project, things are actually going towards specialization, commercialization, etc., etc.

but it does strike me as a little ironic that the Americans are rolling up their sleeves to re-invent the Apollo spacecr

They should scrap the ISS

[Joce640k]

Does the ISS serve any useful purpose...? Scrapping it would save billions.

Going to the moon could be big business if the whole Helium3 thing works out. The USA should be joining international efforts to build a shared moonbase.

Save the planet, etc.

Re:

[yancey]

I fully believe Helium3 is the primary reason we are going back to the moon (and that other countries are racing us to get there), as Helium3 is the most likely fuel source for the reactors that fusion scientists want to build today since it gives off far less destructive neutron radiation than hydrogen reactions. Petroleum won't last forever and we're already complaining about the high prices. Still, I don't agree with scrapping ISS at this time. ISS allows us to learn about the effects of longer-duration

Re:

[Joce640k]

"ISS allows us to learn about the effects of longer-duration missions on the human body, for example bone loss. "

Do we need to spend billions making it any bigger?

It seems to me there's more important things to spend the money on.

PS: A permanent moonbase has a lot of advantages over a space ship. On a permanent base it's much easier sleep/eat/exercise in some sort of centrifuge to simulate normal Earth gravity. You could eat normal food with a knife and fork and drink out of a glass.

"a new kind of spaceship"??

[OriginalArlen]

If there's one thing Orion definitely won't be, it's "a new kind of spaceship". It's the same fundamental design used by every other manned vehicle with the exception of the STS and Buran (which sadly never made a manned flight), all the way back to Vostok-1.

Re:

[cashman73]

On the outside, yes, it will LOOK a lot more like the spacecraft from the Apollo era and such. But on the inside, it will have modernized technology, and other things that we've learned from the space shuttle program. So in the end, it will be a heck of a lot more reliable, more comfortable, and overall a much better spacecraft. It's true, ... we can learn a lot from failure.

Sorry Russia

[argStyopa]

You can't there, we already planted a flag. It's ours, by your rules.

Plans are cheap

[nsayer]

Shoot, I can plan a base on the moon. Doesn't mean a thing. It will cost them billions of rubles to actually DO it, and I don't think they have a big enough credit card.

Re:Plans are cheap

[jpop32]

I don't think they have a big enough credit card.

Umm, think again... Currently, Russia holds the third largest money reserves in the world. They are running budget surpluses for seven years straight (thanks to oil & gas prices), last year they ended up $100+ billion in the black. Meanwhile, the US is close to $900 billion in the red. So, as far as credit goes, the US could be considered sub-prime market, unlike the russians, who would have a number of platinum cards to choose from.

Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!

[DerekLyons]

Ah Bullwinkle Bear, that trick never works!
 
Seriously, the Russians have been announcing a moon base in 'ten years' about every third year since the Soviet Union failed. (During the off years, they announce a Mars mission.) About the only thing that changes is the date on the press release.
 
This is nothing but political manuvering by Roskosmos.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Adambomb]

Please take note that all of them are indeed belong to us, monsieur.

Re:

[VonSkippy]

You must be new on this planet.

Fuck you.

[Anonymous Coward]

global warming, ozone holes: Relatively pointless to solve. An asteroid hitting the planet will cause far more damage than someone not being able to grown corn in their backyard any more.

overpopulation: Unsolvable, unless you like forced abortions.

nuclear threat: Unsolvable, the genie is out of the bottle.

If we stay on Earth, we as a race, are fucked. No - not just Americans. No - not just those brown-skinned terrorist folks. No, not the Jews, or the gays, or the Democrats. EVERYONE. EVERY LAST MAN,

We're not moties

[Hognoxious]

overpopulation: Unsolvable, unless you like forced abortions.

There are other solutions to that. Contraception, for one. Works even better in combination with education.

Re:

[ScrewMaster]

Yes. I hear that's working well for China, India and the rest of the third world.

Re:We're not moties

[vidarh]

It is working well for China - their population is on track to peak and start reducing in a few decades. As for India or the rest of the third world, they've never put enough resource into trying.

In addition to contraceptives and education, the third part which is also important is to increase the living standard. Historically, as living standards and health care reach a certain minimum level, birthrates start rapidly dropping all of their own.

In fact, if the rest of the world caught up with the developed countries, we'd be faced with a big problem of how to avoid the population from dropping dramatically - most industrialized countries populations are currently propped up by immigration.

Re:

[theuedimaster]

"As for India or the rest of the third world, they've never put enough resource into trying."

Dude you're clueless - some many years ago the India gov went on a forced, military-backed campaign to effectively neuter their young men... shit man - it was so terrible no body wants to remember, and no body in India wants to take any sort of government backed measure to reduce population growth.. my dad still remembers that time, it was damn scary.

Re:

[leathered]

I don't quite understand you, are you trying to say we're fucked?

Re:

[Plutonite]

No no, he's just saying we're all pretty much fucked.

Re:

[The One and Only]

overpopulation: Unsolvable, unless you like forced abortions

Overpopulation is already solved. Japan, Western Europe, the US, pretty much anyplace that has a high standard of living is already at zero population growth (not counting immigration). Implementing the solution is a problem, but the solution is already known, and if anything, it's unethical to not implement it.

Ignoring cost, heading to sea

[Shihar]

Even beyond the cost of space travel making exporting people to space and beyond silly, there is the simple fact that Earth is jammed full of resources. Even if you could magically dump a billion people on Mars, why on earth would you? Would you rather go to the frozen and lifeless radiation filled near vacuum that is Mars... or simply go live in northern Canada or on the ocean? It isn't like Earth has a great shortage of surface area, especially if you are willing to make a few floating or sunken coloni

Re:

[randall_burns]

Ask yourself this:
In a world where in all developed countries, birth rates are negative, what is a chance to go to a place where birth rates are likely to be positive worth?

I suspect that for some people, it would be quite valuable.

Re:We are not ready

[enrevanche]

This has nothing to do with interest in space exploration. It is about investing in local technology companies and making sure that the technologies are mastered by local industry. It is also about investing a lot of money into military applicable technologies.

Re:

[Hognoxious]

Yes, they should cure cancer first.

Re:We are not ready

[Half-pint HAL]

Do we really need to build a dozen because US, Russia, China, India, Europe, Japan can not agree to invest a billion dollar-equivalents each instead of spending 10 times more money for separate bases?

Co-operation would be good, but would it be the best method? Maybe not. If we have 10 people independently working on 1 problem, we could get as many as 10 solutions. If everyone works together, we get no more than 1 solution. (Of course they'll come up with many ideas, but they'll only fully develop and test one.)

This is not about invention -- it's about engineering. Imagine if the world's civil engineers had all worked together to build bridges and between them, they'd built millions of bridges like the Mississippi bridge that recently collapsed, or the Tahoma narrows bridge. We could now be living in a world without bridges.

And consider the houses in earthquake zones. It's the Big One and 50% of the town is levelled. Had there been one engineering team in charge of all houses, maybe 100% would have been safe -- or maybe 100% would have collapsed.

HAL.

Re:

[The One and Only]

It's the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. And incidentally, they not only rebuilt the bridge, but just this summer they finished a second one.

Re:

[iamacat]

If we have 10 people cooperating to work on one problem, they can still introduce some independence and redundancy in a design process. And they can still decide to implement 2 solutions with radically different designs to maximize probability of success. They would just be able to ask each other questions when lacking individual expertise on a particular issue.

Re:

[Chrononium]

Perhaps Russia is taking a cue from North Korea - you can survive on relatively little if you only support your military and keep the rest of the population in stark poverty. Of course, Russia is likely banking on getting a lot of money for oil, especially if they can somehow tap reserves beneath the northern ice caps. Thus the military buildup and the Cold War rhetoric. Plus, I'd imagine that it's obvious that governments don't go into space for just exploration: there's definitely gotta be some profit in

Re:

[Turotulco]

Do you imagine that the hole in the ozone layer or global warming or global CO2 concentrations were thouroughly mapped without spacefaring technology? What else is out there that effects our entire planet that we have not discovered yet, are not yet aware of, because we are not standing outside of the system in order to see it? Shall we all hide our heads in the sand? Return to living in tipi's? Were the first mammels ready when they first ventured out of the forest treetops? Were the first Europeans ready

Re:

[iamacat]

Europeans were sure not ready to go to America. They ended up exterminating the existing sentient spieces at their new home, in a significant part by accidentally or knowingly spreading diseases to which the native's immune system was not prepared. We don't need any more of this kind of "exploration". Do you really want to turn Mars into an overheated parking lot with a few Walmarts? We might need to live there someday you know.

I might future suggest that we refrain from radically altering composition of th

Re:

[khallow]

Bad analogy. There's been plenty of fruitful reinventions of the wheel over the millenia. A modern example is the inflatable radial tire.

It appears to me that someone truly interested in human space exploration should become an expert in international politics and direct his/her talents in that direction before committing to reinventing the wheel many times over.

Pointless waste of time, even compared to reinventing the wheel.

Re:

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Reasonable question - why it is score 0, I have no idea.

Unfortunately the answer is one that the questioner probably won't want to hear:

There is NO point to a moonbase or going to Mars. None. We can send robots to do excellent work. Nearly everything a human can do in those harsh miserable environments, a robot can do. Maybe not as fast on the ground, but certainly don't require a few acres of food and water and entertainment. The robots can be made to be much more robust than humans and if one gets a d

Re:

[shaitand]

'I imagine they will send some few people there just to be able to say "We sent some hairless ape creatures to Mars", but beyond that? Naaah. Not worth the trouble.'

There are very big reasons to expand to both the moon and to mars. The first is that the only purpose we have in life is to perpetuate the species and we are all sitting on one rock looking pretty vulnerable at the moment. The second is overpopulation, even going the Chinese route is only a stop gap measure.

Re:

[shaitand]

Even if you are right about population (I'd have to disagree, the world might be CAPABLE of supporting 12 billion but the US about as heavily and densely populated as it SHOULD be) that still ignores the fact that if one of the many big rocks hurling at our planet should hit it we are toast.

The space program will begin to progress at a more reasonable rate once it is out of government hands. Private corporations will hush up accidents so they aren't as afraid of mishaps. They also understand that there are

Re:

[Nullav]

I'd assume it's because of technological constraints. Sure, people got up there, but there was also a good handful of failures along the way for things like how much oxygen was in the air. Recall that Columbia burst into flames just because of one tile, and that was only a few years ago.
Also, the Soviets and Americans had an unhealthy fixation on orbital nuclear weapons at the height of the space race. I doubt many corporations really had any serious interest in space flight at the time.

Re:

[kerrbear]

>Jetsons was 6 years ago people
>>But The Great Kazoo failed to show up. Don't you know your cartoon history, dude?

I know cartoon history. Kazoo already showed up in the stone age.

Oh, right, topic.

Do you think they will send up Martin Landowski and Barbera Bainovich?

Re:

[Nullav]

Well surely the writers didn't think people would have flying suitcase cars the next day.

Re:

[Duhavid]

Are we in charge, or is economics?

I think we are letting the tail wag the dog here. Profitable
cant be the only motivation for us to do everything.

Re:

[Tablizer]

robots are still freaking cool and can pave the way for remotely constructing habitats.

That is true, but not very practical yet. Plus, the further away from the Earth, the longer it takes the signal to control them and get feedback. We'll probably have to wait until AI, and by then they might decide they don't want to keep us.

         

Re:

[CrazedWalrus]

This is what I've been wondering about. Why don't we send up some sort of habitat that can be assembled by robotics? The robots can check the habitat and make sure that it's airtight, make sure everything is functioning correctly, all that. Once they're done, we can start planning sustained colonies there. Who knows? We might even be good at it and decided to build a small town where we can bring an entire colony. I don't know, but robotic construction really does seem to be the way to go here.

Re:

[Nullav]

I don't see many exotic animals leaping around on that gray rock up there.

Really bad idea, until we have a base established

[WindBourne]

Far better to use Saturns or just slightly bigger and do many more launches. The high costs of launches are NOT the rockets themselves, but the ground crew. The shuttle costs about 1B/launch because of the fixed costs of ground crew to service them. Spacex is doing it right. They are designing their rockets to have a VERY minimal team (big part of the reason why they use jet fuel rather than hydrogen). They do have in the works a BFR (big fucking rocket), where the engine itself is pushing into the F1 (saturn V) class. [blogs.com] Combine that with the spacex plan to use 9 engines on a booster, AND are tying together 3 boosters, and suddenly you are looking at a monster, in a hopefully cheap config. But that is planned for later this decade. perhaps combine that with a maglev launcher, and we are looking at a low costs launcher.

Re:Really bad idea, until we have a base establish

[zippthorne]

Yeah, but one reason that the ground crews are so extensive is that conventionally fueled rockets must use razor thin safety factors: they are over 90% fuel mass, after all. If you can get it down to 50% fuel mass (like an airplane) or 5% fuel mass (like cars) you can afford to have much higher safety factors on not just the structure, but also the mission planning.

If your car was made of paper and 90% of it's mass fuel and used that up just going to the grocery store and back (and all of that was on the to trip; the trip back is downhill, but you gotta time it just right) you'd probably want a ground crew for it as well.

With robustness comes smaller ground crews. How large is the ground crew for autos and airplanes? In both cases, it's less than one operator per vehicle. In both cases, infrastructure improvements are projected to eventually obviate the physical drivers as well. The shuttle needs so many more because it's experimental and only just barely makes it to its destination both in terms of fuel and structure.

It's just too bad that NERVA and ORION put out big clouds of radioactive materials. They'd really be quite useful for getting out of the atmosphere, being both high thrust AND high Isp. Usually you have to pick one or the other.

Re:

[zero_offset]

NERVA does not produce "radioactive clouds". The reactor heats the reaction mass, but there is no direct contact between the two. It might produce ONE, if the reactor exploded, but we've gotten pretty good at safely launching small reactors, even though I suspect most people don't realize it (many satellites are powered by simple reactors, RTGs). It's also worth noting that due to the limited temperatures that are possible (you don't want to melt the ship, and you're limited in terms of the weight you can l

Re:

[zippthorne]

I believe the problem with NERVA was that the material at the interface between the reactor and the propulsion mass becomes radioactive, and this material tended to ablate.

Re:

[khallow]

I favor many more launches over bigger rockets. Many of the costs, including ground crews, R&D, launch infrastructure are mostly fixed costs. So the cost per launch goes down a lot when you increase your launch rate. Also, high launch frequency gives you valuable experience to make your future launches safer and more efficient. And that in turn helps with such things as insurance, another big cost of launching rockets.

Re:

[Cyberax]

So what? US also can't find its own ass with two hands (see "Katrina, hurricane"). Maybe you should shutdown ALL scientific projects, dismiss all military and start thinking of the children?

Re:

[tcdk]

Bingo! .... if things are going to the shits, find something else people can concentrate on.

Like going to the moon ...

Re:

[Black-Man]

Moscow is the most expensive city in the world! St. Petersburg is almost as bad (or good depending on perspective). But, their economy is based on the price of a barrel of oil which is fine for now - its where they take it from here.

Re:

[AJWM]

Gee, the last time I was in St. Petersburg, prices were very reasonable.

Mind, at the start of that visit a week earlier, the city was still called Leningrad. Interesting times.

Re:

[timeOday]

One thing is resurrecting the monster in Russia, and that is the high price of oil. Middle-East terrorism has the same cause. Every fill of the gas tank sends wealth and strength straight into the pockets of Putin and Muslim extremists. Without this windfall, they would be powerless. If we really care about national security and global stability, we must develop sustainable energy sources.

Re:

[malsdavis]

You obviously know nothing about the country!

Last time I was in there (about a year ago) I saw an extremely prosperous country with public facilities rivaling our own. I'm sure it still has its bad towns (especially in Siberia) but we have plenty of them here in the USA also!

Re:

[arivanov]

Yep. I suggest going to the library and renting "The Negotiator" by F. Forsyth http://www.amazon.co.uk/Negotiator-Frederick-Fors y th/dp/0552134759/ref=pd_bbs_sr_4/203-8884289-89535 21?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188637076&sr=8-4 [amazon.co.uk]. The book itself is nothing much compared to many of his other writings like "Dogs of War", "The Veteran" or "The Day of the Jackal". It is the basic plotline of the book that is really scary (it was written in 1988-1990 when the wall crumbled):

The cold war is in its prime and

Re:

[ScrewMaster]

Treatment of the poor ... well, if you're poor, that means you don't have a lot of money. That's true. And if you want to get rid of your poor, you only have a few choices: forcibly transfer wealth from the non-poor to the poor (i.e. welfare state, and America spends a LOT of taxpayer money on that), kill all the poor or ship them elsewhere ... or figure out how to make real jobs for those people producing real goods. That's the trick.

The latter requires investment and forethought. Countries that fail to

Re:

[pipingguy]

After WW2 a lot of "office" jobs were created, and these were mostly pushing paper around. Then stuff happened.

Now we have much more efficient methods of pushing paper (i.e., information) around, so, frankly, we need a lot less people. What to do now?

Those displaced by automation will find work by repairing computers/robots and building computers/robots, right?

Re:

[phantomlord]

You mean to tell me it spends more on this than on defense? Not even close! Defense used to be 20% of the whole budget in non war years. You know what it is now when we have an unnecessary war entered under false pretenses, which we are coincidentally losing? Does anyone even know what IRAQ cost? What it's going to cost over the next 10 years? Don't forget a lot of money is wasted on pork projects and things like NASA.

2007 estimated federal budget(in billions):
National Defense: 447

Education: 88
Health: 285
Medicare: 377
Income Security: 357
Social Security: 556

Let's throw in a wild and crazy overly inflated $200 billion more for Iraq. That puts us at $647 billion for defense and $1663 billion for welfare spending out of a budget of $2592 billion. Even if you're one of those people who insist that SSDI/SSI "shouldn't" count (though it obviously does), that still leaves the social programs at $750 billion which is

Re:Yeah right

[evilviper]

You mean to tell me it spends more on this than on defense? Not even close! Defense used to be 20% of the whole budget in non war years.

That's just completely and totally wrong.

I picked 2000 to fit your critera. Name a year if you want to actually argue anything.

Federal:
15% National Defense
22% Social Security
11% Medicare
6% Medicaid
6% Reserved for Social Security

That puts social programs at 45% (more for education, et al.), over 3X the spending on National Defense.

What's more, only an idiot would just compare the federal dollars. You see, in the US we have a little something called STATES. Now, these "states" spend very, very little of their money on "defense" since that's almost entirely a federal issue. These "states" however spend a huge percentage of their state revenues on social programs, and is where 90% of the money for education comes from. If you just look at federal taxes, you'd think we don't spend anything on education, but you'd be completely wrong... and you, in fact, are.

Re:

[forgoil]

The US makes really poor decisions on how to spend the tax payers money. Russia simply don't have the money in the first place. That is why the US did go to the moon, why they built way more bombers, and why they won the cold war.

The kingdom of Sweden hereby declares that we will built a five star hotel and spa on the sunny side of Mars by 2030. It will feature no russian vodka at all, but have wonderful Swedish Absolut Vodka in fountains all over the facilities. It will totally rock and beat all of your da

Re:

[jabuzz]

Thing is that Russia didn't used to have money. Now Russia has *NO* national debt, and is making tanker loads of money on oil and gas. Russia now has the money, it now has money to start spending on these prestige projects. Russia wants respect and you get respect through large military spending and prestige projects.

Re:

[timmarhy]

money is the problem most likely. russia is not what you would call a developed country for the most part.

Re:

[technomancerX]

Just a note, there are no plans for the Saturn V booster. They were destroyed along with all other Apollo program blueprints when the program was cancelled. Which is really quite funny when you consider Orion is just a super-sized Apollo system. The only thing new is the computer technology... I read an article recently that they're concerned about the Orion heat shields because they don't know if they can replicate the process without the original workers that put them together.

Our tax dollars at work...

I'

Re:

[flyingfsck]

Global warming is beneficial. Would you prefer to have another ice age?

Re:

[pipingguy]

Please forgive me as I recently moved to a Mac and now think I know everything.

Re:

[Ash Vince]

Not sure what you point is, but did you know that some theories suggest that global warming could trigger the next ice age. Here are some links:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12 374,1083419,00.html [guardian.co.uk]
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8398.html [newscientist.com]
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130-11.htm [commondreams.org]

Re:

[sznupi]

And who was bullied most in school?

Re:

[zakezuke]

This seems to be turning into a real space race. On one hand we have china and india competing in who will land a human first, and on the other hand we have Russia and the US competing for the first moon base. But in the end, the US will be looked upon as the total victor of this space race as well. The reason is that because of their new long term vision, the US is the only contender that will develop a way to go to mars at the same time as they're planning the moon trip. By 2030 when moon bases are old news, everyone will be looking at mars but the US will be the only country with a chance to get there. Mars will probably be the end of this space race since its so much harder to go anywhere else.

A moon base would likely be a good springboard to setting up real bases elsewhere in the solar system. While Mars is relatively close, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are far more interesting, specifically:
Titan - Titan at least has a decent atmosphere, toxic to humans, but still makes it more hospitable.
Europa - At least has gas pockets, and the possibility of subterranean bases. But it's inside Jupiter's radiation belt.
Callisto - About as attractive as our moon, but at least near the hot spot in the so

Re:

[cashman73]

Titan - Titan at least has a decent atmosphere, toxic to humans, but still makes it more hospitable.

Sounds an awful lot like New Jersey,...

Europa - At least has gas pockets, and the possibility of subterranean bases. But it's inside Jupiter's radiation belt.

Didn't that last message from HAL 9000 say we couldn't ever land there?

Callisto - About as attractive as our moon, but at least near the hot spot in the solar system for fuel and materials for further exploration.

Did you say, "fuel?" I think

Re:

[i41Overlord]

I think our idiots will wake up long before that happens. Right now they're just sitting fat and happy, but when the sh!t hits the fan, they'll be forced to make a change. Voting for people like Bush seemed like a good idea to them then, but if the country starts going down the tubes, they'll wake up and realize that people like that aren't a good choice after all.

Just dig a cave on the moon!

[cpghost]

but to build a base, methinks youd need something heftier..

Not necessarily. All you need is more flights and/or round-trips.

Actually, building a moon station, while farther away, may still cost less energy than building a space station, if done right, because you don't have to lift as much mass from the Earth! Most of the heavy materials needed for the superstructure is already on the moon. Just dig out some caves (which can be done by robots which don't need a costly artificial atmosphere), seal 'em

Re:

[zakezuke]

Actually, building a moon station, while farther away, may still cost less energy than building a space station, if done right, because you don't have to lift as much mass from the Earth! Most of the heavy materials needed for the superstructure is already on the moon. Just dig out some caves (which can be done by robots which don't need a costly artificial atmosphere), seal 'em off with light titanium or similar stuff flown in from the earth, fill it with the usual set of cables, pipes etc... and there you have a nice, perfectly usable permanent underground moon base! It may take some years to build, but since it's a modular design, it can be done over an extended period of time. And if you're already on the moon, you could start mining and using the local minerals etc... to extend the station

It's a good question whether the moon would be a great place for mineable minerals or if the the main asteroid belt would be a better choice. At least with the moon solar is more available, so that opens the door to solar smelters, so perhaps a combo of mass drivers in the main belt to jet raw material the moon doesn't have, such as water, and moon based site to convert the raw materials into a usable form.

Re:

[sznupi]

OTOH resurrecting Energia is much more possible than Satuen V resurrection; large parts of it are even still flying (Zenit rocket evolved from side boosters of Energia)

Re:

[amightywind]

Space cooperation is an instrument of political power. As naughty as Russia and China have been in the last few years expect no significant inclusion of them in the Orion project. China or Russia may indeed supplant the US in space, but I see absolutely no technical basis for it in the near future. Russia is content to fly 50's era technology. The Chinese just buy Russian and haven't launched in 2 years. Both programs are moribund. I personally thing Japan has the best prospects in Asia.

Naughty indeed

[amightywind]

Russia is a mafia state. China: Maoists in business suits. 'Nuff said.