Russia plans to mine the Moon
January 27, 2006

Good evening,

“Russia plans to mine the Moon”

Feed that phrase to GOOGLE and get 104 matches (if you leave the quotes off you get
“Results 11 - 20 of about 2,260,000 for Russia plans to mine the Moon. (0.34 seconds)”

Bob sent me the note below and if you notice the web site link is for an English version of the Arab Aljazeera web site.
(ABOUT - http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/5D7F956E-6B52-46D9-8D17-448856D01CDB.htm )

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It seems that another space race to the moon is developing between the USA and Russia/China.

Bob MacBird
Conroe, Texas
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/65F240F9-CC80-4677-93D6-EBCACE8E7A45.htm

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I copied the text below. I looked at a number of the web sites that GOOGLE found and they are basically the same so I thought I would see what I could find for Nikolay Sevastyanov, Head of the Rocket and Space Corporation Energia. See a post from 11/02/2005.

Will be interesting to see who actually comes up with the money to launch to the Moon and then what comes of it. – LRK -


Thanks for looking up with me.

Larry Kellogg

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
News ltr: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
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http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/65F240F9-CC80-4677-93D6-EBCACE8E7A45.htm

Russia plans to mine the Moon
Wednesday 25 January 2006 4:21 PM GMT


Russia is planning to mine a rare fuel on the Moon by 2020 with a permanent base and a heavy-cargo transport link, a Russian space official has said.

"We are planning to build a permanent base on the Moon by 2015 and by 2020 we can begin the industrial-scale delivery ... of the rare isotope Helium-3," Nikolai Sevastyanov, head of the Energia space corporation, was quoted by ITAR-TASS news agency as saying at an academic conference on Wednesday.

The International Space Station (ISS) would play a key role in the project and a regular transport relay to the Moon would be established with the help of the planned Kliper spaceship and the Parom, a space capsule intended to tug heavy cargo containers around space, Sevastyanov said.

Helium-3 is a non-radioactive isotope of helium that can be used in nuclear fusion.

Rare on earth but plentiful on the Moon, it is seen by some experts as an ideal fuel because it is powerful, non-polluting and generates almost no radioactive by-product.

Details of the Parom orbital tug are available on the Parom page of http://www.russianspaceweb.com/

There is an extensive Wikipedia entry on the Kliper programme and related developments here
AFP
By
You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/65F240F9-CC80-4677-93D6-EBCACE8E7A45.htm
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http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/379/16403_moon.html

Astronauts will land the Moon with spades to dig for helium-3
11/02/2005 17:02

A few kilograms of the lunar substance will be enough to start a thermonuclear electric power station

Head of the Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, Nikolay Sevastyanov, said the other day that the International Space Station was getting its second wind and it got new objectives. The ISS is supposed to be used as a platform to assemble complexes sent to the Moon.

"One of the station docks can wonderfully do for receiving carriers with lunar blocks. This may be a lateral dock of Zvezda and Zarya modules or additional platforms on the propulsion modules," representatives of the corporation said.

Ordinary booster rockets like Progress or Soyuz are supposed to deliver components of a lunar ship from the surface to the ISS. A flight to the Moon will require one or several stages to pull the complex to the Moon, and one spaceship for astronauts. Primarily, three pioneers will be enough to reach the Moon, circle the satellite and then get back to the surface. Subsequently, the number of astronauts may considerably increase depending upon the results of the test flight. It is not ruled out that astronauts will even have a chance to land on the Moon during the second flight.

Today, experts consider opportunities of mining helium-3, the key mineral which can be found on the Moon. The Rocket and Space Corporation Energia states that this new fuel may be even more effective than traditional ones. A few kilograms of the lunar substance will be enough to start a thermonuclear electric power station. Delivery of helium-3 from the Moon to the surface will return great profits. To begin the mining of helium-3 on the Moon, astronauts must first of all build a base for miners to live and work in. Experts already know the exact location of helium-3 fields on the Moon. A special machine will be going about the lunar surface; it will dig, warm the lunar soil, regolith, and then extract helium-3. It is planned to build such a base in one of the lunar seas.

Europeans, Americans and even Chinese also want to participate in the project. November 1, head of Russia's Roskosmos, Anatoly Perminov, came to China to conduct talks about the future of Russian-Chinese space cooperation.

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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK

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