USA and Russia plan to go back to the moon together

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by Plazma Inferno!, Jul 21, 2016.

  1. Plazma Inferno! Ding Ding Ding Ding Administrator

    Messages:
    4,610
    American and Russian engineers are getting closer to a new plan for cooperating in space, one that would go beyond low Earth orbit and preserve the multinational alliance forged at the dawn of the International Space Station program in 1993. Organizations on both sides are quietly toying with the idea of going back to the moon together. That is, if politics don't get in the way.
    With the ISS scheduled to make a controlled plunge into the ocean in 2024, the partners have been preparing to go their own ways. NASA, while funding companies like SpaceX to go to orbit, is developing the Orion spacecraft and the super-heavy rocket called Space Launch System (SLS) for manned missions into deep space and potentially as far as Mars. The European Space Agency (ESA) jumped on NASA's bandwagon few years ago, agreeing to contribute the service and propulsion module for the Orion. But the second-largest ISS contributor, Russia, has so far remained uncommitted to any joint venture beyond the station, mostly because of financial reasons, and some may say politics.
    But, while NASA and the Russian space agency Roskosmos try to navigate the political minefield, industry engineers on both sides formed their own alliances to look into the matter from the technical prospective and build a moon base in ten years.

    http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a21884/us-russia-moon-plan/
     

Share This Page