Head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said that “This is about creating a long-term base, naturally, not habitable, but visited. But basically, it is the transition to robotic systems, to avatars that will solve tasks on the Moon surface”, which shows that Moscow is moving ahead with a general proposal that was first made a few years ago. It’s an open secret that the world is in the midst of a new space race between the US, Russia, China, and even a few other countries that are trying to enter the field, with this process unofficially started by America after Trump declared the creation of his country’s so-called “Space Force”. The US claims that it needs to act in order to thwart Russia and China’s militarization of this domain, while those two multipolar Great Powers have consistently accused the US of actually being the one to break international law by secretly doing this all along.
Moving beyond the controversial rhetoric and into objectively recognized reality, however, there’s apparently no stopping the process that the US has unleashed, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that every manifestation of this race will be inherently militarized. Russia’s proud history of exploring space is universally acknowledged after it was the first country to send a satellite and a man into orbit, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it still longs to send a man to the moon after the US beat them to it back in 1969 during America’s first victory in this race. There are practical reasons for doing this other than prestige and the sake of science because a moon base is thought to be required for facilitating the future mining of mineral-rich asteroids, something that still remains in the realm of science fiction for now but shouldn’t be discounted as a promising industry of the future.
President Putin also famously said last year that “whoever becomes the leader in the sphere (of AI) will become the ruler of the world”, and he also emphasized his nation’s prioritization of this technology and other related ones during a keynote speech that he made earlier this year ahead of Russia’s presidential elections, so it’s logical that his government would seek to pair this with space exploration and the potential mining of asteroids that might eventually follow in order to become a global leader in this respect. That’s why Russia’s plan to construct a robot-built moon base is more sensible of an investment than it might initially seem to those who hadn’t thought it through, though the country first has to prove that it has the technology to pull off this feat before it becomes something that the rest of the world can take seriously.
The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Nov 09, 2018:
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