Posted on 09/20/2004 5:39:43 PM PDT by wagglebee
In the days of the Cold War, Soviet commanders and their best scientists were working on a project to build military headquarters on the moon, the Novaya Gazeta weekly reports.
The paper writes that the lunar base project was developed 30 years ago and was abolished only because of its enormous cost.
The newspaper cited Aleksandr Yegorov, deputy general designer of the General Machine Building Design Bureau (the name of the bureau suggests that it deals with top secret military projects) as saying that he personally took part in the development of the lunar base project.
Soviet scientists considered the moon to be a very good place for a strategic headquarters as nuclear strikes on its surface would lose most of their destructive force. As the moon has no atmosphere, no shockwave could spread there and the radioactive dust would immediately fall out back on the surface without an atmosphere to carry it.
The designer also said that the USA had also developed a lunar base project and the Soviet scientists had been aware of these plans.
Yegorov said that the Soviet Union had planned to put two spaceships into orbit and assemble them into a single station that would fly to the moon. At first the lunar settlers were to live in moving shelters and later a stationary base was to be built.
Crews of four cosmonauts were to spend up to one year on the moon. To make the base habitable it would have been furnished with water and air purification systems and even a special space greenhouse.
The project was abolished only due to its enormous cost, Yegorov said. According to him, the Soviet project was "tens of times” more expensive than the Apollo project of the United States, which cost $34 billion.
Baby steps, commies.
How would having a handful of cosmonauts on the moon save the mother country if Rusia were bombed to oblivion?
Little heavy on the makeup, but the rest looks eminently practical.
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