MOSCOW - Russia plans to send cosmonauts to land on the Moon for the first time in its history and to build a moon base in the next decade, the state news agency Tass has reported.
The proposals are outlined in a draft plan presented by Vladimir Solovyov of RKK Energia, the corporation responsible for manned space flights, Tass said on Wednesday.
“Preparations for the deployment of a lunar base — 2031-2040,” Tass quoted the draft plan as saying. It also spoke of exploiting the moon’s resources.
In August, Russia’s first moon mission in 47 years failed when its Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed into the moon, underscoring the post-Soviet problems experienced by a once mighty space programme.
American astronaut Neil Armstrong gained renown in 1969 for becoming the first person to walk on the moon, but the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 mission was the first spacecraft to reach the moon’s surface a decade earlier, and the Luna-9 mission in 1966 was the first to make a soft landing there.
Yuri Gagarin became the first human in outer space on April 12, 1961, but Soviet cosmonauts never made a human landing on the moon.