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RUSSIA PLANS TO PUT A COSMONAUT ON MARS BY 2020
James Burk
April 20 (MOSCOW) -
Russia is ready to send human beings to Mars, and will begin detailed planning to do so.
This announcement was made to a London newspaper reporter by a
Russian official, the chief of a once-secret space science institute. The official,
Anatoli Grigoriev, surprised his international colleagues earlier this month
with the prediction that a crew from Russia will be enroute to Mars as early as 2016.
"Our engineers believe we can do this by 2020 and, from a
medical point of view, there are no big hurdles left to hinder such a
mission,” Professor Grigoriev said. "Russia can offer a complete medical
support system for a mission to Mars. This is recognized not just here
but also in Houston."
The official mentioned that ten Soviet-era "bio-satellites" had successfully
been deployed by his institute. The satellite project had proved that
Japanese quail could be bred in special aviaries,
which could provide a crew with meat and eggs. Russia has also had fifteen
years of experience with cosmonauts on the Mir space station, where
technologies were developed to recycle waste-water to provide drinking water.
A human mission to Mars has been estimated by NASA to cost between $30 and $50
billion dollars. Even cheaper say private industrialists, and space visionaries such as Dr. Robert Zubrin,
President of The Mars Society.
The frequently-cited cost of $450 to $500 billion comes from a study
NASA did in 1989, which included ridiculously large spacecraft, and a huge space-based drydock
to build them. None of the current mission plans includes those features; they instead
rely on smaller 4-6 person spacecraft and near-term propulsion technologies such as
a plasma engine being developed at NASA's Johnson Space Center (by Astronaut
Franklin Chang-Diaz)
and nuclear thermal propulsion which was tested in the late 1960s in the U.S.'s NERVA program.
Humans to Mars - A MarsNews.com Special Report
Russia to put man on Mars by 2020 (The Times of London article)
Soviet Mars Expeditions (Astronautix.com)
For more on the propulsion methods mentioned in the article, see our special focus section on
Technologies That Will Get Us To Mars.
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