Russia Sets Out Moon Landing Ambition, Leaves Mars Plans to NASA

by Anton DoroshevStepan Kravchenko
June 26, 2015 — 2:14 AM EDT

Russia’s state space agency chief is shooting for the Moon, three years after a predecessor warned that the country was on the verge of losing its competitiveness in the industry.

A manned lunar mission in 2029-2030 is Russia’s priority, while there are no “current stage” plans for a journey to Mars, Igor Komarov, head of the Federal Space Agency or Roscosmos, said in an interview in St. Petersburg last week.

“NASA has Mars as the priority,” Komarov said. “We at this stage are making the Moon our priority. We can be good in rounding each other out and working jointly on this program.”
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Komarov’s ambition of landing a Russian on the Moon contrasts with former Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin’s warning in 2012 that the country’s space industry risked being uncompetitive within three or four years without “urgent measures.”

Russia, which put the first man into orbit in 1961, sees the Moon as a base for deeper space missions, Komarov said. It plans to send three unmanned craft to the Moon before a Russian cosmonaut attempts a landing, though Earth’s nearest neighbor shouldn’t become the object of a technological race between Russia and the U.S., he said.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-26/russia-sets-out-moon-landing-ambition-leaves-mars-plans-to-nasa