Fascists on the Moon. Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Lukashenko celebrate the flight of Jurij Gagarin in a cosmodrome under construction. They dust off the rhetoric on isolation, now imposed by the sanctions for the invasion of Ukraine, which has not stopped Soviet enterprises. What they dream of is landing on the satellite of our planet. The Russian space program depended on the West: now it will increasingly join the Chinese one, becoming its subordinate, as on the geopolitical level. With Beijing, the regime plans a settlement on the moon. It is the militarization of space.
Putin was on his first exit from Moscow since the start of the “special operation”, the formula by which the Kremlin propaganda refers to genocide and war crimes. For the occasion, Lukashenko, dictator of satellite Belarus, joined him in Vostochny, which means “East”, because he is located in the far east of the Federation. The cosmodrome is still a construction site, a city will rise nearby, Tsiolkovsky, named after the father of Soviet rocketry. One might smile on the propaganda from umarèllif either of them did not have the atomic bomb.
Putin invited Minsk to participate in the work, gave instructions to the Roscosmos space agency to train Belarusian personnel to fly Russian spacecraft. It is not difficult to imagine Lukashenko on TV, marking the advance into the solar system with the usual cue instead of the twentieth-century map of Ukraine.
The reality is that Putin is relocating the launches to replace the historic site of Baikonur, in Kazakhstan: the new base will be entirely on Russian territory. Moscow already had a space outpost on the Arctic Circle, Plesetsk. Vostochny has the advantage of being close to China, with which cooperation will increase more and more.
The Kremlin promises to land by the end of the year, but the mission is so dated that it has the same name as when it was designed by astrophysicists and engineers of the Soviet Union. It is called “Luna 25”. The launch was scheduled for 2016. Then in 2018. Then in 2021. Beyond the photo opportunity scenographic, the constant postponements do not be suitable for a space superpower. “We will work with those, among our partners, who want to collaborate with us,” Putin said at the cosmodrome. They are not few, but the words were addressed to Europe and the United States.
After having taken off from “ExoMars”, which was supposed to send a rover to Mars, the European Space Agency (ESA) has suspended relations with Roscosmos also for the Moon. “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the consequent sanctions – reads a note – constitute a fundamental change of circumstances and make it impossible for ESA to implement the planned lunar cooperation”. Both missions should have started by the end of the year. The European rover was about to be shipped to Baikonur when Putin’s troops started bombing Kiev.
Compared to the glories of the space race era, Russia has lost ground. He has been studying the Soyuz succession for some time, but the Oryol model will not be ready before the end of the decade. As vehicles, the Soyuz are a guarantee of reliability and a piece of space exploration history, but they are not exactly the last frontier. The first flew in 1967, they have been modernized a dozen times and the most recent version, the Soyuz MS, dates back to 2016.
The Soyuz represented the astronauts’ lift to the International Space Station (ISS). The next crew will arrive in orbit in Elon Musk’s SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. As Samantha Cristoforetti told in the press conference of the Minerva mission, the Soyuz are faster, but require manual interventions in case of anomalies and force you to travel immobilized. Thanks to SpaceX, the United States terminated the contract with Roscosmos for these “passes”, which brought the Russians 90 million dollars for each astronaut on board.
After aligning on the fake news, the alliance between China and Russia is cemented on space. They are not suggestions, a report from the American Defense Intelligence Agency (Dia) photographed it. In these eighty pages the growth of the material that the two autocracies have put into orbit is monitored: + 70% in the last two years, + 200% between 2015 and 2018. It is orbital expansionism. The lunar base that Beijing and Moscow would like to complete by 2035 will then be used to exploit the satellite’s mineral resources.
About 40% of the Moon’s rocks are composed of oxygen: methods have been discovered in the laboratory to extract it from there, rather than transport it from Earth. The solar wind deposited hydrogen, helium and other elements on the regolith, the lunar dust. Among the fragments that are due to this flow of particles, there is Helium-3, a very rare isotope on our planet: it is considered among the possible fuels of the nuclear fusion reactors of the future.
In that document of the Dia, there is also concern for the arsenals, towards war scenarios in the universe, the so-called “space warfare“. China, the second largest space industry in the world after the United States, has tested a hypersonic missile that, according to the Americans, could be used to hit their satellites, which are used for military communications and data for precision rocket targeting.
Russia also tested, in November 2021, an anti-missile system against a satellite, destroyed in thousands of debris that endangered the international space station. Even though the Kremlin is further behind the Chinese, it already has ground-based laser weapons to disrupt or destroy satellites in orbit. Iran and North Korea are trying to equip themselves with similar technologies. Putin’s references to nuclear power are disturbing: in the Soviet past, a satellite with atomic reactors fell on Canada in 1978.
As with the economy, where the Chinese CIPS system is a candidate to replace the SWIFT from which some Russian banks have been banned, scientific ties measure a country’s alliance system. In fact, in addition to Beijing, the governments of India and South Africa have not yet broken off their partnership with Moscow. Comstech of Islamabad, which brings together ministers from the 56 countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), is negotiating a scientific cooperation agreement with Moscow.
In the face of these threats, the Space Force wanted by Donald Trump seems to be the only legacy of the coup president received by Joe Biden. Indeed, the democratic administration has strengthened it. The new arm of the armed forces will receive $ 24.5 billion, 40% more than last year: a budget comparable to that of NASA, which has existed for sixty years, of 26 billion. Times have changed. Compared to that epic, the spirit is also different.
“Space is not such a utopian and revolutionary place – the historian of the University of Chicago Jordan Bimm explained to Fortune – it is a place where all our problems on Earth are reproduced or amplified”. While the future of that peace monument is being questioned, so much so that it is nominated for the Nobel Prize in 2014, which is the International Space Station, cosmonauts are ready to move to China’s orbital base.
In 1975, an Apollo spacecraft and a Soviet Soyuz docked. “Nice to see you,” American astronaut Thomas Stafford said in Russian. “The pleasure is mine,” cosmonaut Alexei Leonov replied in English. Then a historic handshake in space, in the middle of the Cold War. Today it would be unthinkable.
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