bloggedy blog: the personal weblog of a music lover and aging punk wannabe

:: Thursday, August 18, 2005 ::

Role reversals for NASA and Russian space agency
Who'da thunk that the Russians would embrace private enterprise so well while the U.S. space agency plods under the weight of Soviet-like bureaucracy? Wired reports that "Space Adventures, the company that sent the first tourists to the International Space Station, announced last week that it had cut a deal with the Russian Space Agency, or RKA, to send tourists on a flight to the moon by 2010. It will be the first manned Russian mission to the moon, and the first manned lunar mission, period, since NASA's Apollo 17 in 1972."
Only this won't be much of a race. To be sure, NASA has its own plans to return to the moon, but that mission depends on fabulously expensive new hardware that's still in the conceptual stage and that NASA says won't be ready until 2018.

The Russian mission, on the other hand, will use off-the-shelf hardware that's practically ready to go now. All it has to do is wait for Space Adventures to find a couple of tourists willing and able to fork over the $100 million each to pay for it. That may sound like a lot of money, but it's still less than half of what NASA spends on each space shuttle mission.

To be fair, the Russian mission will simply loop around the moon and come back without landing. But if the first missions are successful, landings will be next, and will require only one new piece of hardware, a lander.

By many measures, the Russian Space Agency is miles ahead of NASA, a situation that's become increasingly clear over the last two and a half years as NASA has had to bum rides on Russia's Soyuz space capsules while its aging, accident-prone space shuttles languish in the shop. With the upcoming lunar mission, it will become abundantly clear just how many miles RKA is ahead: about a quarter of a million, the distance from the Earth to the moon.
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NASA, Space, news, Current Affairs

:: Andrew 08:20 + ::
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