A rocket with a lunar landing craft blasts off on Russia’s first moon mission in nearly 50 years

transistor@lemdro.id to World News@lemmy.world – 115 points – A rocket with a lunar landing craft blasts off on Russia’s first moon mission in nearly 50 years
thehindu.com

“Study of the moon is not the goal,” said Vitaly Egorov, a popular Russian space analyst. “The goal is political competition between two superpowers — China and the USA — and a number of other countries which also want to claim the title of space superpower.”

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I don't question Russian science or engineering, but is this project going to run into the same sorts of issues their war has?

Considering levels of corruption in the last few years and hard brain drain I guess Russian space exploration is doomed. Thanks, Putin!

No Russia beat the us in almost every metric for space flight, we got to the moon first and that's all anyone remembers.

They're a lot of things but their space program is pretty boss.

You can downvote but it will still be just at true.

And in the end its all German tech they stole...

America and our German scientists, and Russia and their German scientists...

Let's not act like operation paperclip wasn't a rat race for both.

They didn't steal German tech, Germany caused two worlds wars and war prizes were taken including technology and scientists.

Setting aside the fact that looting a country you beat in a war is still very much stealing, Germany didn't cause the great war and if you understood an iota of history you'd realize that. Did they use it to advance their own causes and take land/resources? Yeah. Pretty much the standard MO for every country that's ever been in a war, though. Weird to single them out for their actions in WW1 in that regard.

You can downvote but it will still be just at true.

No, it isn't. Space Shuttle for one thing, many Telescopes, Sat's...and so on. Russia hasn't done shit. Even the ISS Modules from Russia are crap and the ones that make the most problems.

The space shuttle was 30 years after the space race homie. Also incorrect, NASA itself disagrees that it was Russia alone at fault.

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Hm, not sure what this reminds me of

I’d rather a space race over an arms race

But sadly we’d probably just end up with both regardless.

A space race is an arms race with people on the missile.

We feared them, because they put up Sputnik, which, by the way, people forget was an emptied out casing of an intercontinental ballistic missile. And, Sputnik itself means "Fellow Traveler", so it's all peaceful, but it was a ballistic missile head, without explosives. So that was a signal, and we freaked in America. So NASA got founded, on the fear factor of Sputnik.

Alright, so we then go to the moon on the fear factor that Russia will control the high ground. Then we go to the moon, space enthusiasts say, "Oh, we're on the moon by '69, we'll be on Mars in another 10 years." They completely did not understand why we got to the moon in the first place. We were at war, once we saw that Russia was not ready to land on the moon, we stopped going to the moon. That should not surprise anybody looking back on it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Putin just needs more points to legitimize next year's "elections": The space exploration is reborn!