Tuesday, January 01, 2013

New Russian Luna Spacecraft

Standing on decades of successful operation of the Soyuz, Russia has made no secret that it has plans that place their crafts well outside Earth orbit.   To effect these plans Russia has finalized the design for a new spacecraft capable of transporting humans to the Moon. 

The "Prospective Piloted Transport System, as it has been designated, design contract has been was awarded to Energia in 2009 and is the company that presently construct the Soyuz.  All indications point to the PPTS being ready for flight soon.   Energia  execs have said  "If we get normal financing, we will start flight tests of the spaceship in 2017."   

Here is the complete Dvice article   and the original RT article here

5 comments:

kallamis said...

Considering their luck at getting to the moon, I believe I'd be passing on this. At least until 30 or so others made it there and back.

Beam Me Up said...

Yep...but did you ever see the documentary on the rover they sent up that was WAY more successful than we were told? Looked a lot like our early Mars rover. It had problems but it ran for quite some time and did a lot of exploration...weird huh?

Unknown said...

I have never heard of there rover ?

kallamis said...

Daniel, here's a link to the wiki article on them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme

Beam Me Up said...

Yeah Daniel. As I understand it, even in the Russian government of the 60s it was pretty hush hush. Information about it was never deseminated to the US public. There were in fact 2 but the second failed after four months. The first ran for 11 months. Here is the youtube link http://youtu.be/GFIFO8fVVWM