AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
Moscow: Russia could send men to the moon within nine years and launch a manned mission to Mars by 2030, an industrialist said Tuesday, on the eve of the 45th anniversary of the first space flight by cosmonaut Yury Gagarin. “We can land on the moon before 2015,” Nikolai Sevastianov, head of the Russian space construction company RKK Energia, told reporters in Moscow.
There are also plans to start mining helium-3, an alternative energy source, on the moon by 2025, he said.
Sending flights to the moon would cost two billion dollars and the mining and transport of the helium between 40 and 200 billion dollars, but the cost could be covered by the sales potential of the gas.
A manned flight to Mars chould take place between 2020 and 2030, Sevastianov said.
The Russian space programme for the 2005-2015 period has no budget for these misssions, he said, but he added that he hoped they could be financed by commercial funds.
“The space industry must become more and more profitable thanks to space tourism and the experiments we carry out in space for foreign clients,” he said.
Sevastianov's space programme calls for the construction of the reusable Clipper shuttle which should eventually replace the Soyuz manned rocket flights to the International Space Station and could be used for moon missions.
Sevasatianov said the Clipper, which will cost 1.5 billion dollars and carry six crew instead of the three squeezed into the non-reusable Soyuz capsules, should enter service between 2012 and 2015.
He said the European Space Agency and Japan wanted to take part in the project and that “definitive replies” would be given by July.
