Russia plans to colonize moon by 2030, report says

May 17, 2011: The moon appears near the earth's horizon in this photograph of an orbital moonset taken from aboard the International Space Station.Reuters

Nearly a half-century after America won the Space Race, Russia apparently wants to take another crack at landing on the moon.

A report in the Russian-language newspaper Izvestia Thursday said the nation is planning to put a manned colony on the moon as soon as 2030, and is racing to dispatch the first robotic rovers to explore the lunar surface two years from now, according to The Moscow Times.

By 2028, Russia would be ready to send manned missions to orbit the moon, and in the program's final stage, humans would be sent to the lunar surface to set up the infrastructure for a colony using local resources.

The first stage of the program is expected to cost around 28.5 billion rubles ($815.8 million), though Russia hopes to attract private investors to help bankroll the project.

Benefits of establishing a moon colony include access to the "treasure trove" of rare and valuable minerals, as well as the strategic importance of using the moon as a launchpad for future missions into deep space, The Moscow Times reports.

The paper adds that China, India and Japan are also developing lunar exploration projects, and a California-based company, Moon Express, is planning to send its first robotic spacecraft to the satellite next year, according to the company's website.

U.S. astronauts first landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and the United States later made five other landings on the Earth satellite. No humans have visited the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.

Click here to read more from The Moscow Times.

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Second Danish zoo plans to kill young giraffe to stop inbreeding

Not again!

Despite the death threats and worldwide disgust when the Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark killed 2-year-old giraffe Marius to prevent inbreeding on Sunday, Feb. 9, a second zoo in the country plans to kill a giraffe -- and says it’s in the animal’s best interest.

The second giraffe, coincidentally also named Marius, lives at the Danish Jyllands Park Zoo. To make room for a female giraffe it plans to acquire, the zoo plans to put down its 7-year-old male, balancing out genders in the facility.

Why kill a giraffe?

Q: How did the zoo end up with a giraffe it couldn't keep?

A: Breeding groups in zoos are made up of a single bull and a group of females. Zoo's remove female offspring to prevent inbreeding, and males to prevent fighting.

Q: Aren't there other options?

A: Zoos could design new giraffe facilities, but many don't have that option. A young bull could theoretically be sent to an all-female group as stud, but experts prefer a larger, more mature male for that, and Marius didn't fit that bill.

Q: What about contraceptives or castration?

A: Yes and no. Until recently, either would have required sedation, which is a relatively high-risk operation with giraffes. They are liable to break their necks when they fall while sedated.

Read more about the zoo's policies here

“We can't have two males and one female. Then there will be fights,” zoo keeper Janni Lojtved Poulsen told Danish news agency Ritzau. “If the breeding program coordinator decides that he should be put down, then that's what we'll do,” Poulsen said.

The first Marius was killed because his genes were already well represented in the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, which aims to maintain biodiversity and didn’t want an excess of similar genes. Despite an online petition arguing that the zoo should spare his life, Marius was shot in the head -- according to European zoo-keeping guidelines -- before being butchered and fed to lions.

Will the second Marius face a similar fate? It might be possible for the zoo to find another place for the giraffe to live, Reuters reported, but the probability of that is small. Like the first Marius, the Jyllands Park giraffe is considered unsuitable for breeding.

Poulsen defended the zoo’s plans, despite the widespread disgust of animal lovers.

“Many places abroad where they do not do this, the animals live under poor conditions, and they are not allowed to breed either. We don't think that's OK,” she said.

'We can't have two males and one female. Then there will be fights.'

- Zoo keeper Janni Lojtved Poulsen

The Jyllands Park Zoo has not said whether it will have a public dissection of its Marius similar to the one held at the Copenhagen Zoo.

The watchdog group Animal Rights Sweden said the plight of Marius underscores what it believes zoos do to animals regularly.

"It is no secret that animals are killed when there is no longer space, or if the animals don't have genes that are interesting enough," the group said in a statement. "The only way to stop this is to not visit zoos."

"When the cute animal babies that attract visitors grow up, they are not as interesting anymore.”

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Moon walk or Death Star? China’s lunar plans a mystery

An artist's conception of China's Chang'e 3 robot on the moon.ESA

A Chinese satellite has entered lunar orbit and should drop a robotic probe on the moon as early as Friday -- the first such moon landing in nearly four decades. But China's ultimate plans are unclear, whether simply scientific or the first steps toward a military base on the moon.

The Chang’e 3 satellite was launched from southwest China on Dec. 2 and entered orbit around the moon on Dec. 6. It will deposit a robotic rover on the moon as early as Dec. 14. China’s long range goals are murky, according to Thomas Reiter, director for human spaceflight and operations with the European Space Agency (ESA). Yet militarizing the moon would be a shame, he said.

“I could not imagine that human exploration is getting … pushed by military consideration,” Reiter told FoxNews.com. “It would really be a pity.”

'It could indicate interest in the next decade in bringing humans to the lunar surface.'

- Thomas Reiter, director of human spaceflight and operations at the ESA

The ESA is helping China to the moon, a landing that will be the first controlled descent since Russia’s Luna-24 landed in 1976. The space agency’s worldwide network of satellites are tracking the science mission while expert teams on the ground are lending technical assistance. But not even the ESA knows exactly what China has planned.

“The strategic long-term goals of China in human exploration … are not very clear yet,” Reiter said. China’s goals could include landing men on the moon, a feat only the United States has managed to do, the last time 41 years ago, he said.

“I believe they are taking a clear path with some first steps, and I could imagine yes, this could be interest in the next decade in bringing humans to the lunar surface.”

Russia also has shown interest in the moon, Reiter said. Yet the ESA, like NASA, has no concrete plans to do more than help when it comes to lunar exploration.

“NASA is not going to the moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden said at an April panel in Washington. NASA spokesman David Weaver echoed that sentiment, telling FoxNews.com that it is working with international partners to plan missions to the moon and elsewhere.

“We are deeply involved in lunar science, with two satellites currently orbiting the moon,” he said. “The global community is committed to working together on a unified deep-space exploration strategic plan, with robotic and human missions to destinations that include near-Earth asteroids, the moon and Mars. 

Reiter also put the moon on a short list, including low-Earth orbit and Mars. But due to budgetary restrictions, the ESA has no plans of its own to visit the moon.

“For the moment, we do not have a dedicated lunar exploration program,” he told FoxNews.com. At a recent conference in Naples, the space agency proposed a program for a European lunar landing mission to the south pole.

“Due to the overall economic situation of the member states, this could not be approved,” Reiter said. “We are looking into a cooperative mission with the Russian partners.”

Yet Reiter said the agency remains focused on the moon, despite a decades-long dry spell in lunar landings.

“I believe the moon is still a very important destination,” he said. “If we really intend to take a human mission to Mars … in two decades or maybe a little more, this way leads by the moon.”

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NY group buys Tesla property, plans science center

MINEOLA, N.Y. (AP) — A New York community group that raised $1.3 million in a six-week online fundraising effort has purchased a laboratory once used by visionary scientist Nikola Tesla.

"We're feeling very excited and gratified that we've reached this milestone," said Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, on Long Island. Her group announced last week that it had finalized the purchase of the Tesla lab and property for $850,000.

Tesla was a rival of Thomas Edison who imagined a world of free electricity. He conducted experiments in the early 20th century at his laboratory in Shoreham, about 65 miles east of New York City.

Volunteers struggled for nearly two decades to raise money to acquire the property with limited success.

Their effort got a jolt of support last summer from Seattle cartoonist Matthew Inman, a Tesla fan who started promoting the fundraising effort on his website, theoatmeal.com.

Within six weeks, more than $1.3 million had been raised from 33,000 donors in the U.S. and 108 countries.

Tesla abandoned the lab in 1917. For many years it was a photo chemical processing plant; in 1993, officials determined that the property's groundwater had been polluted with cadmium and silver. A remediation effort overseen by state environmental regulators was completed last year.

Alcorn said that the purchase of the property was a key first step but noted much work needs to be done before the group can realize its goal: "to create a fitting memorial to Tesla and a science center to benefit the entire world."

She estimated another $10 million will be required to renovate the property, which is overrun with brush and includes several dilapidated buildings in the complex that will likely need to be demolished.

Alcorn said her group's first priority is to secure the property from further vandalism. Additional fundraisers are being discussed, but Alcorn had no specific details.

Among Tesla's accomplishments were developments in alternating current and research in the creation of wireless communication and radio. He died in New York City in 1943.

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Russia plans to send probe to moon in 2015

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will resume a long-dormant quest to explore the moon by sending an unmanned probe there in 2015, the head of the space agency was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

The craft, called Luna-Glob, or Moon-Globe, will be carried by the first rocket to blast off from a new facility that Russia is building in its far eastern Amur region, Roskosmos director Vladimir Popovkin said, according to the Interfax news agency.

"We will begin our exploration of the moon from there," he said of the new space centre that will decrease Russia's reliance of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the ex-Soviet nation Kazakhstan, which it leases.

Russian space officials have said Luna-Glob would consist of an orbital module and a probe that would land on the moon and beam back information about samples it takes from the surface.

The Soviet Union got a jump on the United States in the Cold War space race, sending a probe to the moon in 1959 and putting the first person into space in 1961. But the United States first put a man on the moon in 1969 and Russia has not done so.

The last successful Soviet launch of a unmanned probe to the moon was in the 1970s, and Russia has suffered setbacks in its space program in recent years, including bungled satellite launches and the failure of a Mars probe in 2011.

A successful rocket launch on Tuesday put three military satellites in orbit, the Defense Ministry said.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a plan last month to spend 2.1 trillion roubles ($70 billion) on space industry development in 2013-2020, to pursue projects to explore the moon and Mars, among other things.

(Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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Bigelow Plans First Private Space Station by 2016, Warns of Chinese Lunar Land Grab (ContributorNetwork)

The Next Big Future recently checked in on Bigelow Aerospace, which plans to deploy a private space station in low Earth orbit by 2016. Robert Bigelow, the company's CEO, also had some blunt things to say about the Chinese.

More than the heavily government subsidized rocket companies such as SpaceX, real hopes for a vibrant commercial space sector resides in corporations like Bigelow. So far the government is at once the prime investor and the sole customer of the commercial launch companies it is funding under President Barack Obama's space policy.

Bigelow represents a much more pure manifestation of commercial space. Instead of chasing government subsidies, Bigelow envisions its space facility as hosting private researchers and astronauts, charging initially $28.75 million for a two-week stay, expensive to be sure, but still very competitive compared to what is charged by Space Adventures for a stay on the International Space Station.

Bigelow will benefit from the Obama commercial space plan at least indirectly. Bigelow has signed an agreement with Boeing to use the BA330 capsule, which the giant aerospace firm is developing using commercial space subsidies from NASA. The BA330 is in direct competition with SpaceX's Dragon space ship.

Bigelow would also not be averse to having guests paid by the U.S. government, say researchers who want to run experiments on board its facility. Plans are not quite firm for that kind of arrangement, so Bigelow is relying mainly on commercial customers for now. Of course, the US government is not the only government keen on getting in on space research. Bigelow's prices are low enough that any number of countries could use its space station to do research.

Moving beyond low Earth orbit, Robert Bigelow was quite blunt in his belief that as soon as practicable China would withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty which, among other things, forbids nation states from claiming extra terrestrial territory. China would hence start claiming large sections of the moon, especially the poles where water exists in relative abundance.

Bigelow's assertion may seem far-fetched, but it does mesh with China's aggressive behavior on Earth in its drive to supplant the United States as sole super power. And Bigelow does envision his company as being part of an American response, building inflatable lunar bases to counter Chinese territorial claims.

One of the refreshing aspects of Bigelow's prediction of a Chinese lunar land grab is the implied criticism of Obama's current space plan that bypasses the Moon, which in many ways is strategic territory, in favor of chasing asteroids. If one legitimately fears Chinese empire building on the Moon, then the recourse is to deploy American personal and infrastructure on the lunar surface to preempt that move. And, if Bigelow makes a little more money in the process, one suspects that Mr. Bigelow will not mind getting richer by being a patriot.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.

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