Manned mission to Moon in Russia’s future

William Atkins
Sunday, 02 September 2007 20:26

Science - Space

The Russian Federal Space Agency, also called Roskosmos (or RKA), has announced that it has plans to send cosmonauts to the Moon by 2025 and, then, to build an manned lunar base.          

The head of Roskosmos, Anatoly Perminov, announced on Friday, August 31, 2007, that, “According to our estimates we will be ready for a manned flight to the Moon in 2025,” He also stated that a lunar base could be built between 2027 and 2032, and a manned mission to Mars could be sent after 2035.

Two other goals of Roskosmos are to complete the Russian section of the International Space Station by 2015 and to modernize the Soyuz spacecraft.

The first human probe to reach the Moon was the unmanned Soviet Luna 2, which crashed on the lunar surface on September 14, 1959. The first manned craft to land on the Moon was the U.S. Apollo 11 spacecraft on July 20, 1969, which held American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

Japan became the third country to visit the Moon when in 1990 it sent the Hiten spacecraft to the Moon and released the Hagormo probe into lunar orbit. In 2004, the European Space Agency (ESA), the fourth to visit the Moon, orbited SMART 1 (Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology 1) around the Moon in order to take X ray and infrared images of the lunar surface.

Currently, several countries are planning unmanned missions to the Moon. Of these countries, the ones planning manned missions to the Moon include: NASA (United States), with its first mission starting in 2020; China National Space Administration (CNSA, China), with assistance from Russia, before 2020; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA, Japan), around 2020; Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO, India), by 2020; Roskosmos (RKA, Russia), by 2025.

The media has already dubbed it another space race, and with all of these tentative dates falling around 2020, it sure looks like a race to be the first to land humans on the Moon in the twenty-first century.

The largest national space agencies, in order of size, are: NASA (U.S.), European Space Agency (member nations of European Union), CNES (France), JAXA (Japan), RKA (Russia), DLR (Germany), ASI (Italy), ISRO (India), CNSA (China), BNSC (United Kingdom), and CSA (Canada). NASA’s annual budget is estimated at about U.S.$16 billion, while the Canadian space program is budgeted at about U.S.$0.321 billion.