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http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=406252004
Russian space experts plan manned trip to Mars
JOHN INNES
A GROUP of Russian space experts has announced an ambitious plan to send a six-man crew to Mars within a decade, a project it said would cost only £2 billion.
A researcher at the Central Research Institute for Machine-Building, Russia’s premier authority on space equipment design, said it would carry out the project with funding promised by Aerospace Systems, a little-known private Russian company that says it draws no resources from the state budget.
The programme envisages six people travelling to Mars and exploring it for several months, before returning to Earth.
The expedition is designed to last three years in all, and would depend on a fully equipped spacecraft containing its own garden, medical facilities and other amenities. However, Russian space officials have dismissed the project as unfeasible.
Georgy Uspensky, a department head at the institute, said that the comparatively small budget for the programme reflected plans to use already existing spacecraft.
Sergei Gorbunov, a spokesman for the Russian Space Agency, said he had never heard of the project and that it "was absolutely impossible" to implement with such a meagre budget and in such a short time period. The researchers did not say how funds would be raised, but they claimed that one way such a mission would be profitable would be to involve a reality television show.
Meanwhile, NASA’s rover craft are to continue searching the Red Planet for evidence it once was a wetter place hospitable to life.
The five-month extension to the £450 million mission means Opportunity and Spirit could keep exploring Mars until September - nearly three times longer than originally budgeted.
Dust, cold and mechanical wear-and-tear could curtail the lifetime of either or both rovers, however, said Firouz Naderi, manager of the Mars exploration programme at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
For Opportunity, the move gives it time to build on the evidence it found that water once bathed its landing site on Mars.
Why is it a country with hardly no money for space seems to be able to do things on the cheap???? Yet NASA stil seems to spend spend spend, and make things cost so much, why? Their wasteful spending and scraping of programs, its ironic that they get anything done at all.
Acidrain
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http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2033]Old News
But welcome to the board anyway.
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Yeah i realized that after i posted it, sorry all. Thank you
Acid
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