Russia to build a mine on the moon

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Current Russian policy to supply most of Europe with gas and oil - and also Asia when the Sakhalin complex is on stream - is earning them huge revenues.

In the next fifty years, we will see a gradual move away from fossil fuels.  If Russia is serious about mining He3, then it stands to continue to gain financially by scaling back it's oil & gas production in favour of monopolising the world's supply of He3.

However, the practical problems are enormous.  Remember that no-one has walked on the moon since 1972 and no Cosmonaut has walked on the moon at all.  Russia does have extensive experience with automated space vehicles, but it's unlikely that the mining and shipping processes can be entirely automated.  

Although sources of oxygen and water have been identified, considerable engineering work would be required to shield cosmonauts from solar radiation and micro meteorites.  It's cost upward of $60bn to put a space station into orbit the size of three double decker busses and crewed by five people.  The ISS crew is also less than 300 miles from the Earth as opposed to the 250,000 miles to Earth from the lunar surface.  

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cecilia wrote:
because this "feat" wasn't done using a calculator. it was done using many talented human minds working at full capacity. THAT'S why it was and still is the most amazing thing homo sapians have ever done.

Amen!

Putting a man on the moon ranks as humanity's greatest ever achievement.  Although the motives were political and some of the personnel involved in the space race had very shady backgrounds, the end result was beyond question.  

Those twelve men were sent there represented the noble human desires to explore and to gain knowledge.  

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Hyperspeed wrote:

However there are a number of scientists that have made it vocal that the radiation levels on the moon would be too high, as would venturing too far from near Earth orbit. They say that for a week long journey back in '69 it would have killed the astronauts and THAT is why Russia never made it. What happened to Laika, and that monkey?

Laika was killed due to her oxygen supply running out, Sputnik 2 was never designed to return to Earth.  The poor dog was on a one way ticket.  The monkey in question might be offended (Ham the chimpanzee - a primate not a monkey) as he is a veteran astronaut and is still alive in a retirement home after successfully being launched by an early Mercury capsule.

Many astronauts / cosmonauts have stayed in space for months at a time (one has clocked up over a year) during extended stays aboard Skylab, Salyut and Mir.  These stations have all been placed in low Earth orbit. It is also possible to see satellites and manned spacecraft from the Earth.  

I've never been into conspiracy theories but I've read somewhere that the only solution to this problem of man(/woman) exploring deeper space is to somehow constantly regenerate the nerve tissue that is damaged by over-exposure to radiation (remember how instant this was in that film about Los Alamos?).

Long stay astronauts have reported having to take shelter behind batteries in order to shield them from radiation during periods of solar activity.  One astronaut actually reports seeing intemittent flashes of light even though his eyes were closed.  This was due to radiation hitting his retinas!  

Most of the shielding comes from Earth's own magnetic field though.

If man did land on the moon then I'm sure we've been given a much glossier image of it than we should have. Such a feat would have incurred much higher casualties and would have taken a lot more time and money than a single economy could have coped with. And probably adding to the rose-tinted view of the landings is the fact we never went back... but now Bush has spent all his pocket money.

An enormous amount of money was expended in the moon missions.  Apollo 1 cost the lives of three astronauts (Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom) on the launch pad due to faulty wiring and poor escape hatch design.  

It must be remembered that by the time Apollo 11 touched down, several test flights had taken place - Apollo 7 in earth orbit carrying astronauts for the first time, Apollo 8 went round the moon, Apollo 9 tested the Lunar Module in Earth orbit and Apollo 10 actually got to the moon and the Lunar Module descended to a few miles above the lunar surface before returning to the command module in orbit.  

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union never publically acknowledged the casualties of it's space programme.  It is known that several rockets were destroyed on the launch pad, killing some of the USSR's greatest scientists.  Rumours persist to this very day that cosmonauts were killed in space.  Do date, the acknowledged casualties are Vladimir Komarov and the returning crew from Salyut 1.

Anyway, I'm sceptical and not totally against the moon landings - but like the holocaust, which many are now questioning, information is kept far too secret, things are glossed over, spin and lies blur reality. Even truth can become tarnished.

There's no questioning the holocaust.  I've actually met allied ex-soldiers who were involved in the liberation of Belsen.  The truth is that six million people were robbed of their possessions and met untimely deaths at the hands of a totalitarian regieme.  

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Can we agree on a substitute word / phrase?  Male Chicken Trench?

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Noooooo!  I didn't realise that Ham passed away in 1983???

Still, his exploits in space must have earned enough pension to keep the guy comfortable during his retirement years.  

Anyone know what the banana / dollar exchange rate is?

 :banana:

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I grew up slightly too late to see the glories of the Apollo project.

Such a monumental undertaking cost the US government $100bn+ during the 60s and whatever the shady objectives of cold war one-upmanship or the dark past of some of the participants it was the last good thing that humanity did.

The fact that no-one's been back since is because the Apollo project was unsustainable, hugely expensive and had little potential for resulting in a permanant manned presence in space.  The same reason exists why it took forty four years (1961 - 2005) between a state funded manned spaceflight and the very first privately funded venture.

My own father was approached during the design of Apollo (his field is instrumentation), as were many hundreds of British engineers.  Apollo was designed from the ground up, each piece of wire, each rivet and each moving part (numbering into the millions) was designed by a human being, in Imperial mesurements and in the space of a few brief years.

Hoax my ass.

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ICBMs were in existence long before manned spaceflight.  Soviet Sputnik/Vostock craft were put into orbit by adapted ICBMs and US Titan rockets were also built for launching nuclear warheads - indeed, German V2 rockets can be considered the grand-daddy of the mighty Saturn V.

With a 100 tonne payload, the Saturn V was more than capable of putting something in orbit around the moon.

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I'd have to say that the Saturn V was the technological achievement of the last century and for once something so awe inspiring wasn't built with the express aim of killing other human beings.

I recall a quote in "Moondust" saying that even if the Saturn V had a 99% reliability rating of all it's components at launch, as many as 3000 would be expected to fail!

That suck a massive device managed a 100% success rate of all it's most vital componets a grant total of 11 times (Apollo missions 8 - 17) plus the Apollo/Soyuz linkup is frankly staggering.

A good number of British scientists worked on both Saturn and Apollo too.

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Hyperspeed wrote:

A bad number of Nazi scientists worked on them also. And I doubt they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts...

The many British (and Canadian) scientists and Aerospace engineers working on Apollo were there because the USA had systematically applied political pressure to the goverment of the UK to dismantle Britain's aircraft industries.  The Brits - like the Germans also - were there because they were out of a job.

Yes, some of the German scientists were unapologetic Nazis, but not all.  It would be churlish to tar all of the German scientists with the Nazi tag as membership of the SS and Nazi party was required in order to gain career advancement furing the war.  

I must say that a great deal of the suspicion that falls on NASA is due to the generals who wield the whip. They 'contain' information on grounds of national security when it could be of vital interest to mankind.

NASA should be a public limited company in the spirit of Wall Street where people can buy shares in missions. Not some federal military quango who's better ideas get poached for weapons systems.

NASA is a civillian agency, but is constrained by the military and politics too.  Remember the shuttle? The early concepts were far removed from what we actually got - not because the technology wasn't there but because the shuttle's design was subject to certain military criteria too.  How do you think that many of the USA's more sophisticated Spy Sats got there?  

Similarly, NASA's work in advanced aerodynamics also pays dividends for the military too.

Despite the cynicism and the fact that out of twelve men who walked there, only one was a boda fide scientist ("Jack" Schmitt) the moon landings remain for the finest hour of mankind for the last half century - and briefly re-ignited the spirit of adventure in humanity that's become so jaded thanks to a culture of cynicism, litigation and mean mindedness.  For that I'd happily pay my share of the $12 per head that Apollo supposedly cost the American taxpayer.

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Poor kitty looks less than amused with his choice of headgear!