Russia Eyes Lunar Base on Moon’s South Pole

By All News Center on Sep 7, 2015

The Space Race is back on as Russia eyes lunar base .

While the U.S. focuses on planning a mission to Mars, the Russians are looking closer to home.

Even though no Russian cosmonaut has yet walked on the Moon, Russian space agency Roscosmos has announced an ambitious plan to build a high-tech lunar base on the Moon’s South Pole.

The Russians are sending a mission to scout locations for the base. Engineers are already building the spacecraft, called Luna 25, which is scheduled for launch in 2024.

And they are not alone. The European Space Agency has released a video titled ‘Destination: Moon’ explaining that the Moon is an important and crucial step in mankind’s future. The ESA has planned manned missions to the so-called “dark side of the Moon”, the far side of the Moon which never faces the Earth (all of the American astronauts who walked on the moon landed on the near side of the Moon).

Like the Russians, the Europeans are interested in establishing an outpost at the moon’s South Pole near the edge of one of the largest impact craters in the solar system, the South Pole-Aitken basin. This is the area that the Russians and Europeans will send scout robots, and eventually cosmonauts and scientists, to build a small colony complete with science and technology labs, a spaceport and an observatory.

While the interior of the 8-mile-deep crater is shrouded in frozen darkness, the mountain peaks surrounding the rim of the crater have the potential for nearly continuous solar power.
But solar power is not the only resource available at the Moon’s South Pole.

In 2009, NASA sent a Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) to search for ancient ice in the permanently shadowed South Pole crater named Cabeus. The upper stage of the satellite was used like a missile to smash into the lunar surface at more than 1.5 miles per second, creating an impact plume that instruments aboard LCROSS analyzed, finding traces of frozen water.

The presence of water at the Moon’s South Pole was a tremendous discovery, because if colonists can mine ice under the Moon’s surface, they can use the hydrogen and oxygen atoms for rocket fuel.

Meanwhile, the U.S. space program is involved in a debate between the Martians and the Lunatics.
Some at NASA want to return to the moon to expand lunar science and potentially construct moon bases, while others, most notably Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot on the Apollo 11 mission and second man to walk on the moon, are in favor of a Mars mission.
“We’ve done the moon — we understand it better than anything else,” Aldrin told Space.com. “We’ve got to stop thinking of short-term hurrahs and start thinking of long-term investments.”

Roger Launius, senior space history curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, says the debate has been going on for decades.
“As long as I’ve been involved in spaceflight, for about 20 years now, there has been this debate going on between the two groups,” Launius said. “I refer to them as the Martians and the Lunatics — the people who want to go to Mars, and the people who want to go back to the moon. No one side has the clear-cut answer. There are positives and negatives for both.”

Clearly, the Russians have come down on the side of the Lunatics.