Russia plans to put man on Moon by 2030
Moscow approves cooperation with Nasa at International Space Station and announces moonshot by 2030
Russia has announced plans to begin manned flights to the Moon by 2030 and will continue to use the International Space Station with Nasa for nine more years.
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said it would revive its lunar programme, first studying the Moon with unmanned spacecraft that would both orbit it and land on the surface.
“Close to 2030, the plan is to move over to manned flights to the Moon,” it said.
The announcement confirms a Roscosmos strategy document leaked in 2012 which suggested that a manned mission to the Moon was being planned.
Despite relations between Russia and the United States reaching a post-Soviet low over the Ukraine crisis, the countries’ space agencies will continue to cooperate until 2024, when Russia hopes to build its own orbital station with modules removed from the ISS. That new station would be used to “provide Russia with guaranteed access to the cosmos”, said Roscosmos.
Russian government officials had indicated last year that they may end funding of the ISS in 2020, but that proposal appears to have been rejected in favour of keeping it going for another four years, as Nasa had suggested. Following the retirement of the US space shuttle programme, Russia is the only country providing transport to the ISS.
Russia won the first round of the space race when it launched the first man to orbit the Earth, Yury Gagarin, in 1961. But America fulfilled John F Kennedy’s promise to reach the Moon by the end of the decade, landing there on July 20, 1969, with Apollo 11. The Soviet Union later cancelled its lunar programmes.