From the AP
Moscow - Russia should build a new nuclear-powered spaceship for prospective manned missions to Mars and other planets, the nation's space chief said Thursday. Anatoly Perminov first proposed building the ship at a government meeting Wednesday but didn't explain its purpose. President Dmitry Medvedev backed the project and urged the government to find the money.
In remarks posted Thursday on his agency's Web site, Perminov said the nuclear spaceship should be used for human flights to Mars and other planets. He said the project is challenging technologically, but could capitalize on the Soviet and Russian experience in the field. Perminov said the preliminary design could be ready by 2012, and then it would take nine more years and cost 17 billion rubles (about $600 million) to build the ship. "The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs, including a manned mission to Mars, interplanetary travel, the creation and operation of planetary outposts," Perminov's Web statement said.
The ambitious plans contrast with Russia's slow progress on building a replacement to its mainstay spacecraft - the Soyuz. Russia is using Soyuz booster rockets and capsules, developed 40 years ago, to send crews to the International Space Station. The development of a replacement rocket and a prospective spaceship with a conventional propellant has dragged on with no end in sight.
From Wikipedia
The December 1958 issue of Aviation Week included an article, Soviets Flight Testing Nuclear Bomber, that claimed that the Soviets had made great progress in their own nuclear aircraft program. The magazine claimed that the aircraft was real beyond a doubt, stating that "A nuclear-powered bomber is being flight tested in the Soviet Union. Completed about six months ago, this aircraft has been flying in the Moscow area for at least two months. It has been observed both in flight and on the ground by a wide variety of foreign observers from Communist and non-Communist countries." Unlike the US designs of the same era, which were purely experimental, the article noted that "The Soviet aircraft is a prototype of a design to perform a military mission as a continuous airborne alert warning system and missile launching platform."
Photographs illustrated the article, along with technical diagrams on the proposed layout. They were so widely seen that one company produced a plastic model aircraft, a surprisingly faithful rendition of the diagrams in the article. Concerns were soon expressed in Washington that the "the Russians were from three to five years ahead of the US in the field of atomic aircraft engines and that they would move even further ahead unless the US pressed forward with its own program". This led to continued funding of the US's own program, for a time. In reality the entire article was a hoax.
I built that very same model kit. It is hard to grasp how afraid we were back then in the Cold War. Sputnik, Cuban missile crisis, Hungary. The Soviet Union and China seemed poised to crush us at any time. Nikita Kruschev once remarked that Communists would not need fire a single shot to conquer us - he said our own children would do the job for them and that they 'would bury us'. He was beyond prescient and I'm much more afraid now.
Did you know that all those ICBM's that the Russian military paraded through Red Square every year were fakes? Cheap plywood and sheet metal mock-ups. Russia has always been and will always be an impossible disadvantage. The Russians - the dominant ethnic group in the old Soviet Union - had to spend all of their rubles on containing and restraining countless other ethnic groups across 12 time zones.
Despite all Russia's oil and gas money - that is still the case.
Spread the word!
