Russia and China agree to build joint lunar space station

Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...
They built Mir. And the Russian segment if ISS is an evolution of it.
And they are to lauunch a new lab module this year replacing the nadir
airlock.

To be fair, the Nauka plans date back to the early 2000s. It's original
launch date was supposed to be back in 2007. We're still waiting for it
to launch. That's not terribly impressive. So, I'm not sure what China
is thinking teaming up with Russia.

In fact, according to Scott Manley they need to launch it before the
end of the year because the warranty on a number of the modules
expires then (or if not launched by then, it's a bit unclear)!

He usually put a lot of effort into researching for his videos so I'm
inclined to believe him on this given the history of Nauka.

IE, it started out as a backup for Zarya in case of a launch failure
and at one point was at least 70% complete (and might have progressed
even further). Zarya was successfully launched in 1998 so they didn't
need the backup and so they later decided to repurpose it for Nauka.

They seem to have rebuilt most in the mid-2000 forward but I would be
surprised if there weren't still a considerable number of parts that
was installed in the initial 1994-1998 build period.

And the initially planned launch year appears to have been 2007 so
it's now more than 13 years delayed. And as noted there's likely parts
in it that are at least 27-28 year old.


However, China has something needed to go to the moon: money. And
that is something Russia isn't getting with low price of oil and
sanctions against country.

True.

Yup, and I expect that there's still a number of competent engineers
in the Russian space program that must be really frustrated by
designing a long succession of paper rockets.

So from Russias side it might also be a way to try to keep their
rocket engineers from wandering off to greener pastures (like one of
the small-sat launcher companies) so they have the resources when (not
if) they want to say modernise their ICBMs.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INiagI9MjvU