perfidy

No not that red. Commie red. Siberian Light links to a slew of articles about Russian space plans. It is, after all, Cosmonaut day in the motherland.

Among the articles he links, we see that a Russian company is claiming that it will put six cosmonauts on Mars by 2009. (2011 according to this AP story.) The articles are sadly lacking in details, but they say that they can do it for $3.5 billion. That would be a significant savings over the proposed NASA plan (anywhere from $30 billion to $1 trillion, depending on who you listen to.) The Russian space officials have declared this nonsense, and based on what I know of the current state of Russian technology and industry, I'd have to agree. They couldn't get to the moon in '69, so I don't see how they could get to Mars in five years now, especially given the economic problems they face.

A researcher at the Central Research Institute for Machine-Building, Russia's premier authority on space equipment design, said it would carry out the project with funding promised by Aerospace Systems, a little-known private Russian company that says it draws no resources from the state budget.

The program envisions six people traveling to Mars and exploring it for several months before returning to Earth. The expedition is designed to last three years in all, and would depend on a fully equipped spacecraft containing its own garden, medical facilities and other amenities.

Absent some idea of how they intend to do it, I will have to remain dubious. Still, more power to them! Maybe the Russkies and Chinese and Indians can force America to actually use its capabilities in a sensible and forward looking way, instead of remaining in a blinkered, stuck-in-the-sixties, bureaucratic mindset.