U.S. and Russian Scientists Are Making Plans to Go Back to the Moon Together
What U.S.-Russian cooperation in space might look like in ten years: a moon base.
American and Russian engineers are getting closer to a new plan for cooperating in space, one that would go beyond low Earth orbit
and preserve the multinational alliance forged at the dawn of the International Space Station program in 1993. Organizations on
both sides are quietly toying with the idea of going back to the moon together. That is, if politics don't get in the way.
With the ISS scheduled to make a controlled plunge into the ocean in 2024, the partners have been preparing to go their own ways.
NASA, while funding companies like SpaceX to go to orbit, is developing the Orion spacecraft and the super-heavy rocket called Space
Launch System (SLS) for manned missions into deep space and potentially as far as Mars. The European Space Agency (ESA) jumped on
NASA's bandwagon few years ago, agreeing to contribute the service and propulsion module for the Orion. But the second-largest ISS
contributor, Russia, has so far remained uncommitted to any joint venture beyond the station.
U.S. and Russian Scientists Are Making Plans to Go Back to the Moon Together
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a21884/us-russia-moon-plan/
