Russia plans return to Mars, Moon despite money woes

Hello, forums people. Here's your dose of current events for the day:

Visitors are rare these days to the museum of Russia's Space Research Institute in Moscow even though it holds gems like the model of the Soviet Lunokhod, the first ever space rover to land on the Moon, in 1970.

Source - user link on phys.org

Duh, right?

It's nice they're talking about doing this. A new space race would help revive public support for space exploration, which we really haven't had enough since the 1960's.

The space race was responsible for many great innovations and inventions, both in the U.S. and Russia. It would be neat to see a space race between Russia, China, and the U.S.

One thing is that manned space exploration isn't nearly as feasible or practical as robotic exploration but manned exploration would, IMO, have a bigger impact on public interest in spite of that.

Sure, it's way more difficult, resource-consuming, and impractical but manned space exploration is far more exciting. Maybe it's dumb but I'm all for it. I want humans to go to Mars. Hell, I want to see a colony start on Mars in my lifetime.

Exploring with robots is great for gathering data. Manned space exploration is the way to make progress toward eventually not having our species bound to the planet. Come on, I want to see Star Trek become reality someday (warp drive may never be possible but I do think we can eventually live on other planets).

Huh.

That's certainly something to consider.

GeRevealsThat, you said about seventy six words about this. I guess you have a lot to say, huh?.

On Monday, February 22nd, 2016 at 2:58 pm, Wolfwood29 said:

A long time ago, Plato said:

If we don't *need* to figure out how to efficiently and more safely put humans into space and travel longer distances, we probably won't at all. The big problem is that in the process of getting to a more "Star Trek" space-faring society, a lot of people are going to die. We learned hard lessons from the Challenger and Colombia disasters. There's a human cost to figuring out how to improve space travel.