The Luna-25 mission will seek to land near the south pole of the moon, collecting geological samples from the area, and sending back data for signs of water or its building blocks, which could raise the possibility of a future human colony on the moon.
How is Russia shooting off moon rockets while engaged in war. NATO needs to up the ante and give Ukraine what they need to put the Russians under ground, not into space
Honestly, I’m kinda okay with them spending money and resources on this. Better to spend resources doing this than building missiles and tanks. My only concern is that it may be serving a secondary purpose for testing new ICBM launch systems.
Space programs have always been part military.
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/military-rockets-launched-space-age
Luna-25 launched on a Soyuz rocket, which is actually derived from an ICBM in the R-7 family. There aren’t any active ICBMs in that family anymore, and it seems like their newer liquid fueled ICBMs use different fuels and engines. They could share avionics, structures, and upper stages, but the heavy lifting is done pretty differently.
*As far as I can tell from memory and a quick Wikipedia scan
Considering the R7 ICBM that this rocket is based off was first tested in the late 1950s I kinda doubt it’s of much concern
It’s because of the war I’d bet. They hope to demonstrate to the world that they can walk and chew gum at the same time.
We and our NATO allies are using Ukraine as we used the middle east and africa.
Ukraine is a small country stuck in the middle of our war games.
Our military companies will keep making money after the war building stuff back up.
“we” didn’t invade ukraine
War games.
Politics plays roles in everything that has to do with money, war being one of the major donations to the wealthy.
Middle East, Africa, Latin America.
Reason why many come to US, we had something to do with the overthrowing of the gov’ts in place.
It’s probably been in development for a decent number of years. By the time they invaded Ukraine, it may have been more difficult to cancel it if 99% of such a big mission was complete.
Plus, Russia (with China as a partner) is looking to assert its dominance in space once again. If their partners are willing to throw in $$$, Russia will prove they are worthy of such a task & capable of providing rockets that can achieve escape velocity.
So, the ISS still relies on the Russian side to stay up. Russian Progress spacecraft do most of the reboosting for it to stay in orbit. It stinks, but that’s still the reality up there. At least the war got every Western satellite off Russian rockets, but we’re still doing crew exchanges, where a Roscomos Cosmonaut flies on a SpaceX Dragon 2 and a NASA Astronaut flies on a Soyuz.
I wish NASA would have been able to fund ISS replacements sooner so we could get out of there before 2030.
On the other hand let Putin burn as many resources as possible and then bring the hammer down