We could send men to Mars by 2016 - Russian space official
Posted on: Friday, 2 April 2004, 06:00 CST
Text of report by Russian news agency ITAR-TASS
Moscow, 2 April: Given enough funding, Russia could organize and send a manned mission to Mars as early as the year 2016, Nikolay Bryukhanov, a deputy director-general of the Energiya rocketry and space corporation, has told ITAR-TASS.
"Energiya has designed an interplanetary expedition vehicle with solutions for life support, radiation protection, landing on Mars and return to Earth," he said.
Work on a Mars programme has continued in Russia since 2 April 1964, when the first spacecraft, Zond-1, was sent up towards the Red Planet to study space and test technologies for long-distance space flights. The interplanetary vehicle "draws on the experience of generations of scientists and designers from dozens of organizations in the Russian space industry", Bryukhanov, himself from Russia's leading maker and operator of spacecraft, said. "The idea is to assemble the vehicle in near-Earth orbit; it would include a service module, electrojet motors for propulsion, a landing module for the descent to Mars, and a module for the return to Earth," he explained. The journey to Mars and operation of a life-support system for a crew of four to six members "would be powered by 240- metre solar energy cells".
A mission to Mars would take just over two years, Bryukhanov believes. "We calculate it would cost about 20bn dollars, which is much less than the figure they arrived at in the USA."
Meanwhile, head of the Federal Space Agency Anatoliy Perminov thinks that Russia and the USA "could join forces in preparing a manned flight to Mars". "Russia has vast experience in manned space flights and is fully capable of taking part in the American space programme, including preparations for a flight to Mars," he told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday [31 March].
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