Free Republic

Russia's Federal Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov said Friday that a prominent Russian businessman-turned-politician is training to fly to space as a tourist in 2009 and underscored the need to cut his country's dependency on the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for manned space exploration. "If we create a new manned spaceship, which our program until the year 2015 provides for, then we will need a new rocket and that rocket will require a new launch pad," Perminov told reporters in a press conference here. We have not decided whether to build that pad at Baikonur or in Russia." While Perminov...

As NASA prepares to once again send humans to the surface of the Moon, Russia is also developing its own plans for future manned spaceflight. The country's Clipper project to develop a six-person spacecraft to deliver astronauts into Earth orbit, and potentially beyond, appears in some ways to be the Russian Federal Space Agency's answer to NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). "We're starting to design this new transportation system to support the International Space Station (ISS) once it's complete," said Nikolay Sevastiyanov, president of the Russian aerospace contractor RSC-Energia, during a recent space conference where the program was discussed. The...