Europe's Next Space Chief Wants a Moon Colony on the Lunar Far Side

by Leonard David
Space.com's Space Insider Columnist
May 01, 2015

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado — The incoming leader of the European Space Agency is keen on establishing an international base on the moon as a next-step outpost beyond the International Space Station (ISS).

Johann-Dietrich Wörner expressed his enthusiasm for a moon colony at the Space Foundation’s National Space Symposium, a gathering of global, commercial, civil, military and "new space" experts that was held here from April 13 to April 16.

"It seems to be appropriate to propose a permanent moon station as the successor of ISS," Wörner said. This station should be international, "meaning that the different actors can contribute with their respective competencies and interests."

Wörner said that "the moon station can be an important stepping stone for any further exploration in deep space," adding that a lunar outpost could help humanity learn how to use resources on-site instead of transporting them.

"In any case, the space community should rapidly discuss post-ISS proposals inside and with the general public, to be prepared," Wörner concluded.

The case for the moon

Wörner's appointment as the next director general of the European Space Agency (ESA) was announced on Dec. 18, 2014. He will succeed Jean-Jacques Dordain, whose term of office ends on June 30.

Currently, Wörner is chairman of the executive board of DLR, the German Aerospace Center. He advocated a lunar far-side base at the 31st National Space Symposium, both in a panel of space agency leaders and during a focused panel on space in Germany.

"We have to look into the future about what are the next destinations … what to do after the International Space Station," Wörner said. The end of ISS operations is very close, "and we better know what to do afterwards," he added.

Mars is a "nice destination," Wörner said, but he also asserted that a far-side outpost on the moon offers a number of "drivers," including cosmological research.

For instance, the lunar far side is shielded from radiation-chatter broadcasts from Earth, allowing radio telescopes built there to survey the universe with very little background noise, he said.

Wörner told Space.com that the far-side outpost is not a new idea. "But now we have to do it as opposed to study it," he said.

The global space community should seek out joint activities on a scale that a single nation cannot realize, Wörner said. In the past, there were many scientifically sound proposals to further investigate the moon, he added, with special scientific possibilities championed for the lunar far side, such as in astronomy and in fundamental research.

Cis-lunar infrastructure

NASA chief Charles Bolden also took part in the panel of space agency leaders during the symposium.

Bolden had recently come back from Europe, where, he said, he participated in discussions with nations now scripting a space-exploration road map. These conversations touched on many topics, including to what degree other countries wish to cooperate with NASA on its Asteroid Redirect Mission, he said.

"Although Mars is the ultimate destination for humanity, we mustn't forget that there are lots of other places in the solar system. And there are places where humans will go and must go," Bolden said. "A lot of our international partners are interested in lunar exploration."

NASA views the moon as an interesting destination as well, he added.

"We're going to spend a 10-year period of time between 2020 to 2030 in cis-lunar space," Bolden said, "trying to establish an infrastructure in lunar orbit from which we can help entrepreneurs, international partners and the like who want to get down to the surface of the moon."

NASA "can't lead it," Bolden added. "But I hope you'll let me have at least one astronaut on the mission that goes down to the surface of the moon … because there is invaluable experience to be gained from doing that."

Source: Space.com.
Link: http://www.space.com/29285-moon-base-european-space-agency.html.

Russia's new Armata tank makes debut in parade rehearsal

May 04, 2015

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia's new Armata tank appeared in public for the first time Monday, rumbling down a broad Moscow avenue on its way to Red Square for the final rehearsal of the Victory Day parade.

The Russian Defense Ministry last month released photographs of the tank, but its turret was covered with fabric and only the platform was visible. Monday was the first time that the tank was shown uncovered.

The Armata will be a highlight of the military parade on Saturday, the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. About 200 pieces of military hardware and 16,500 troops will take part in the parade on Red Square.

Russian and some Western military experts say the Armata will surpass all Western versions. The tank is the first to have an internal armored capsule housing its three-man crew and a remotely controlled turret with an automatic weapons loading system, features that allow for increasing both the level of crew protection and the efficiency of the tank's weapons.

The Armata designers also envisage the use of the same platform for several other machines, including a heavy armored infantry vehicle, a self-propelled heavy howitzer and combat support vehicle. This would cut production costs and streamline technical support and maintenance.

The pioneering design potentially puts the Armata ahead of Western competition, but it is yet unclear whether the Russian weapons industries will be able to meet the ambitious production plan for the new tank.

Under a major weapons modernization program, the military is reportedly set to receive 2,300 Armatas by 2020, but those plans may face revision with the Russian economy reeling under the impact of slumping oil prices and Western sanctions.

Oleg Bochkaryov, a deputy head of the Military Industrial Commission, a government panel dealing with weapons procurement, said last week that the Armata will enter service next year. He said the new tank will not be sold abroad at least for another five years.

Pro-Putin bikers lay wreath in Vienna en route to Berlin

May 03, 2015

VIENNA (AP) — Members of a nationalistic Russian bikers club were greeted by cheering supporters as they laid a wreath Saturday at a monument to the Soviet soldiers who liberated Vienna from the Nazis.

The pro-Kremlin Night Wolves are commemorating the Russian and Allied defeat of Nazi Germany 70 years ago in World War II with a ride from Moscow that is meant to end in Berlin May 9. Some EU officials have expressed criticism of their plans and Poland denied them entry, reflecting strains between Warsaw and Moscow over Russia's role in the Ukraine conflict.

In contrast, their reception in Vienna was strikingly free of tensions. Accompanied by more than a dozen supporters, two group members wearing their colors and displaying flapping Russian flags on their motorcycles, drove up to the central Vienna square to the monument depicting Russian soldiers in a martial pose. Assisted by soldiers from the Russian embassy, they then laid a wreath at the structure, erected by the Soviets after their liberation of Vienna.

Police spokesman Patrick Mayerhofer said a police escort accompanied the group to Vienna from the Slovak capital of Bratislava. Police estimated that about 500 spectators turned up for the event. Some wore t-shirts with portraits of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Others held signs saying "Stop Russia Phobia," and "We are brothers and sisters — no war."

Among those turning out was Russian Ambassador Sergey Nechaev, who thanked Austrian authorities for making the tribute possible. "The bikers only came to commemorate and honor the fallen soldiers who died for the liberation of Austria," he told reporters, in comments focused on deflecting EU anxiety over the trip.

The Night Wolves support Putin, who has ridden with them, and backed Russia's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

AP video journalist Philipp Jenne contributed from Vienna.

Nepali police dig bodies from village and trekking route

May 05, 2015

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Rescuers were digging Tuesday through thousands of tons of earth from a quake-triggered mudslide in Nepal that wiped out an entire village along a popular Himalayan trekking route and killed at least 60 people.

Nine of the victims recovered in the Langtang Valley since the April 25 earthquake and mudslide were foreign trekkers, said Gautam Rimal, the top government official in the Rasuwa district. Villagers say as many as 200 people could have been killed.

The valley and its little village of Langtang are about 60 kilometers (35 miles) north of Nepal's capital, Kathmandu. It was a popular stop for trekkers because of its scenic views of the Himalayas. "The entire village was wiped out by the mudslide. There were some 60 houses there, but they were all buried under rubble. It will be impossible to recover all the bodies," Rimal said.

The village is now about a two-day hike from the nearest town because the landslide has blocked area roads. While helicopters allow easy access, they remain in short supply because of aid missions across the quake-affected parts of Nepal.

The still-rising death toll from the quake, Nepal's worst in more than 80 years, has reached more than 7,500. In Kathmandu, authorities say up to one-third of the city's residents have left since the quake. In the first days, bus stations were jammed with people fearing aftershocks or trying to get home to relatives in devastated villages.

Authorities do not know how many of those people have returned to the capital, but on Tuesday there were still people waiting for buses to leave. "I stayed back here to help out my neighbors and clean up the neighborhood," said Surya Singh, who was at a large bus station. But now he wants to see the damage in his home village — though with many roads still blocked by landslides he was unsure if he could get all the way by bus.

Kathmandu police say nearly 900,000 people have left in the past 10 days. The population of Kathmandu valley — including the city of Kathmandu and smaller towns of Lalitpur and Bhaktapur — is 2.5 million people.

Life has been slowly returning to normal in Kathmandu. Schools are to remain closed until May 14 but some markets are open and trucks have been bringing in fresh food and vegetables every day.

An elderly Nepali villager, and memories of the 1934 quake

May 03, 2015

POKHARIDANDA, Nepal (AP) — He was 9 years old when he felt the earth tremble for the first time. He'd been out in a field, grazing his goats on wild grass below Nepal's snow-covered peaks.

"The earth started shaking," said Fattha Bahadur Rana, who at 90 years old is now the oldest man in this demolished farming village not far from the epicenter of the deadly April 25 earthquake. "I was a kid, I was scared. I saw everyone screaming, and I heard a loud roar." He lisps a little, because he has just two teeth left. "I thought that a plane had crashed from the sky," he said.

It was 1934. Hitler was on the rise in Europe, America was engulfed in its Great Depression, and Nepal was a sleepy, feudal Himalayan kingdom at the northern fringes of the British Empire. Rana had become the man of his house a year earlier, after his father died in Kathmandu, the capital. He never learned the cause. He only knew it was up to him to help his mother and little brother on the farm.

The 1934 quake had a magnitude of 8.0. The epicenter was more than 200 kilometers (120 miles) away, near the Nepal-India border, and in Pokharidanda it did little more than frighten the villagers. In those days, news traveled slowly, but eventually they learned what had happened. More than 10,000 people had died and entire towns and cities had been smashed to the ground.

"Kathmandu was demolished," said Rana. "The king and queen, they were crying." This time, he was not so remote. The epicenter of the recent quake was perhaps a couple of dozen kilometers (miles) away.

But having experienced it once, he knew what the tremors could do. He threw aside the book he'd been reading and scrambled away from the stone house he had built with bare hands, seconds before it came crashing down.

"I thought it was the end of the world. I thought I would die," Rana said. "But now how will I live? I've lost everything." All 30 of Pokharidanda's homes are demolished. Miraculously, all its residents survived the quake.

Few Nepalese remember the 1934 quake. To have lived so long in Nepal is a feat in itself. Life expectancy today is just under 68 in the mountainous nation, and was maybe half that in 1925, when Rana was born.

His life has been otherwise typical for Nepalese villagers. At 16, he married, and soon after joined the army. He had four children and after his wife died he married again at age 32. More children were born, and then grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The village grew.

Now, he and his 82-year-old wife life on handouts and sleep in a flimsy shelter villagers made from corrugated tin set beneath the tumbling boughs of a fiery pink bougainvillea. Pigeons flutter on the makeshift roof overhead. Baby goats forage in the shambles that was once his home.

The Nepalese army came and managed to pull a single box from the wreckage, containing a pensioner ID card that gets him the equivalent of about $5 a month. Everything else — the documents he'd collected over a lifetime, his clothing, his mother's jewelry, and more — has been lost.

"I don't know what will happen next," he said, cupping a cigarette to his lips and gently pulling in. "But this is where I am now. I have to live somewhere until I die."

Nepal shuts airport to big jets; more bodies found

May 03, 2015

KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Runway damage forced Nepalese authorities to close the main airport Sunday to large aircraft delivering aid to millions of people following the massive earthquake, but U.N. officials said the overall logistics situation was improving.

The death toll climbed to 7,057, including six foreigners and 45 Nepalese found over the weekend on a popular trekking route, said government administrator Gautam Rimal. The victims included a French national, an Indian, four other foreigners and Nepalese guides, hotel owners, workers and porters.

The main runway was temporarily closed to big planes because of damage. It was built to handle only medium-size jetliners, but not the large military and cargo planes that have been flying aid supplies, food, medicines, and rescue and humanitarian workers, said Birendra Shrestha, the manager of Tribhuwan International Airport, located on the outskirts of Kathmandu.

There have been reports of cracks on the runway and other problems at the only airport capable of handling jetliners. Despite the setback, the U.N. coordinator for Nepal, Jamie McGoldrick, said the bottlenecks in aid delivery were slowly disappearing.

"I think the problem is there, but it's actually diminishing," he said, adding the Nepalese government eased customs and other bureaucratic hurdles on humanitarian aid following complaints from the U.N.

"The government has taken note of some of the concerns that we've expressed to them and they've addressed those both at customs and the actual handling," he said. Airport congestion was only the latest complication in global efforts to aid people in the wake of the April 25 quake, the impoverished country's biggest and most destructive in eight decades.

People in Nepal — both in remote villages and the capital, Kathmandu — have complained about not seeing any rescue workers or international aid and about a lack of temporary shelters, with many sleeping out in the open because of fears of aftershocks bringing down their damaged homes.

U.N. humanitarian officials said that they were increasingly worried about the spread of disease. They said more helicopters were needed to reach isolated mountain villages that were hard to access even before the quake.

The true extent of the damage from the earthquake is still unknown as reports keep filtering in from remote areas, some of which remain entirely cut off. The U.N. says the quake affected 8.1 million people — more than a quarter of Nepal's 28 million people.

The government said Sunday that the quake had killed 7,057 people. Laxi Dhakal, a Home Ministry official, said hopes of finding survivors had faded dramatically. "Unless they were caught in an air pocket, there is not much possibility," he said.

Among the latest fatalities to be counted were the 51 people, including six foreigners, whose remains were found in the Langtang Valley in Rasuwa district, nearly 60 kilometers (35 miles) north of Kathmandu.

The area, with a dozen inns near the trekking trail, was buried by a landslide after the earthquake. Nepal has been shaken by more than 70 aftershocks following the quake, and its people remain on edge. One brief aftershock Saturday afternoon shook the only paved road in the village of Pauwathok. Residents screamed and began to run, then stopped when the tremor eased.

The small village is located in the district of Sindupalchok, where more deaths have been recorded than anywhere else in Nepal — 2,560, compared to 1,622 in Kathmandu. The U.N. says up to 90 percent of the houses in Sindupalchok have been destroyed.

Aid still scarce in Nepal's remote villages as anger grows

May 02, 2015

MAJUWA, Nepal (AP) — With help still not reaching some isolated villages a week after Nepal's devastating earthquake, a top international aid official said Saturday that more helicopters were needed to get assistance to the farthest reaches of this Himalayan nation.

Many mountain roads, often treacherous at the best of times, remain blocked by landslides, making it extremely difficult for supply trucks to get to the higher Himalayan foothills. "We definitely need more helicopters," Ertharin Cousin, executive director of the U.N.'s World Food Program, told The Associated Press in the village of Majuwa, in the quake-devastated Gorkha district. Aid agencies have been using Majuwa as a staging area to get supplies deeper into mountainous areas. "Even seven days in this is still very much considered the early days, because there are people we still haven't reached. So we need helicopters to reach them."

"This is one of the poorest places on Earth. If the global community walks away, the people of this country will not receive the assistance that is required for them to rebuild their lives," she said.

Cousin said shelter was a more urgent priority at this point than food. More than 130,000 houses were destroyed in the quake, according to the U.N. humanitarian office. Near the epicenter, north of Kathmandu, whole villages were in ruins, and residents were in desperate need of temporary shelters against the rain and cold.

The magnitude-7.8 earthquake killed more than 6,600 people, with the death toll continuing to rise as reports filter in from isolated areas. The U.N. has estimated the quake affected 8.1 million people — more than a fourth of Nepal's population of 27.8 million.

Other teams conducting search and rescue operations also said their work was hampered by a lack of helicopters. David O'Neill of United Kingdom Fire and Rescue said a team from his group drove and then walked for several hours to reach remote villages that had reported 80 percent fatalities.

Most of the residents of Golche and Pangtang villages died in a major aftershock a day after the quake, O'Neill said in Chautara, a village in Sindhupalchok district. He said the team had hoped to reach the areas by helicopter from Chautara, but none were available to charter and they could not get on choppers flown by Nepal's army, so they were returning to Kathmandu.

Nepal's government renewed its appeal to international donors to send tents, tarpaulins and basic food supplies, saying some of the items being sent are of little use. It also asked donors to send money if they cannot send things that are immediately necessary.

"We have received things like tuna fish and mayonnaise. What good are those things for us? We need grains, salt and sugar," Finance Minister Ram Sharan Mahat told reporters Friday. Three senior officials were sent to remote villages after criticism that authorities had not reached some of the areas a full week since the earthquake.

"Our target now is for our officers to reach each of the villages that have been affected by the earthquake," Chief Secretary Lilamani Poudyal said. There was enough food and grain, but the immediate need for tents and shelter remained, he said.

Information Minister Minendra Rijal said Nepal would need 400,000 tents and so far has been able to provide only 29,000 to those in need. Life has been slowly returning to normal in Kathmandu, but to the east, angry villagers in parts of the Sindhupalchok district said Saturday they were still waiting for aid to reach them.

In the village of Pauwathok, three trucks apparently carrying aid supplies roared by without stopping. "What about us?" screamed villagers, as the trucks sped on. Of the 85 homes in Pauwathok, all but a handful were destroyed.

"Nobody has come here to help us. No government, no police, no aid," Badri Giri, 71. Anger and frustration at the slow pace of aid delivery have been growing among residents of remote Himalayan villages.

In the nearby village of Jalkeni, mounds of broken wood and stone line the road, the remains of homes flattened by the quake. On top of one mound, surrounded by a pile of dusty rocks, a broken TV, shredded clothes and bags of whatever she had managed to save from the debris, Sunita Shrestha sat cradling a young girl. The mound used to be her two-story home.

"No one has come to help us yet," said Shrestha, as the sun beat down. "I don't know if they ever will."

Associated Press writer Binaj Gurubacharya in Kathmandu, Nepal, contributed to this report.