The space race between Russia and the United States seems to be on, and the current scenarios look very familiar to the moments during the cold war which played a crucial role in elevating human understanding about the universe. Now, within hours after NASA announced their plans to take humans to the moon, Russia has revealed that they intend to build a lunar base by 2040.
However, NASA's plan to land on the moon may happen before the Russian moon landings, as the United States space agency is apparently trying to have a continuous human presence on the lunar presence by 2030.
Russian space agency Roscosmos recently issued a press release and unveiled their lunar mission plans.
"The goal of the lunar programs is to ensure national interests at the new space turn. The interest of mankind to the moon is associated primarily with the fact that unique regions with favorable conditions for the construction of lunar bases were discovered on the satellite. The implementation of the lunar program will be held in several stages until 2040," wrote the Russian federal space agency (Translated from Russian).
On the other hand, NASA's initial plan in the lunar mission will be building a space station called 'Gateway' which will orbit around the moon. Gateway will be a reusable command module that will ensure human presence. Later, reusable landers that go back and forth to the surface of the moon will be used to ensure continuous human presence there which they aim to achieve within the next decade.
A couple of days back, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia's space agency revealed that the main mission of the country's lunar mission is to verify whether NASA's moon landings were actually real. Rogozin made these remarks during a live video interaction on Twitter when one of the viewers asked the Roscosmos chief whether NASA had landed on the moon ever in history.
"We have set this objective to fly and verify whether they've been there or not," replied Rogozin to the billion dollar question.
