Any government program that has a plan for fifteen years out shouldn’t be taken very seriously. If they really wait that long, they’ll likely be greeted by the concierge at a Bigelow facility. You don’t build a “colony” with a humungous expensive expendable launch system.
6 thoughts on “The Russian Lunar Base”
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But read the ITAR-TASS version of the article.
http://en.itar-tass.com/non-political/730854
“Such large-scale projects as colonization of the Moon or Mars would hardly be funded from the state budget,” corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics Andrei Ionin said. “Planet exploration by people will be a prerogative of private companies.”
I’m sure that part will get left out by a lot of op-ed writers who argue that “we [NASA] need to beat the Russians to the Moon.”
The shameful irony here is that TASS has a far better understanding of economics than the US government does.
Zubrin: Enormous tracts of land were bought and sold in Kentucky for large sums of money a hundred years before settlers arrived despite the fact that, for purposes of development, trans-Appalachian America in the 1600s might as well have been Mars.
Land patents like that can’t work today but a variation might.
Too bad those visionaries are gone.
Except that French and Dutch fur traders via the local natives who ignored such fantasy transactions, were already fighting the Beaver Wars over who actually owned the area . It took the destruction of the local native American groups, the defeat of the French by the British and the American Revolution, before land titles in the area had any real meaning.
Any engineering related plan that goes 15 years out is ridiculous – both for government and private enterprise. Go 10 years back in news archives and read the “conservative” projections about suborbital industry, bigelows space hotels etc. They are all laughable.
Depends on the engineering. A lot of civil engineering gets done on a decadal scale. The Interstate Highway System wasn’t planned for completion before the Eisenhower administration left office, for example. In aerospace, you have a point. Government programs come encrusted with so many procurement proceduralism and design review barnacles that every one of them now seems to take a minimum of 20 years and many are cancelled without never producing any output. By the time the F-35 sees line service, for example, human-piloted air-superioity fighter aircraft are going to be increasingly iffy propositions. Not sure aerospace stuff will ever have the mayfly lifespans of, say, cell phones, but the current situation is ridiculous.
Even the Russians ought to know better. The old Soviet Union used to do 5-year plans, not 10-year plans or 15-year plans. The only 20-year plan I can recall from that period was Nikita Khruschev’s pledge in, I think, 1960 that there would be “an egg a day for every Soviet citizen by 1980.” Not sure how that one turned out, but Nikita K. was forcibly retired in 1964.