Russia to Send Monkeys to Mars

Russia to Send Monkeys to Mars

www.universetoday.com

Russia has a long history of scientific discovery and space exploration through the use of animals. Beginning with space dog Laika in 1957, the space program expanded to run tests on other dogs (many returned safely to Earth) and eventually monkeys. Although the monkey testing program was stopped through lack of funding in the mid-1990's, the nation has announced plans to send the closest descendent of humans to a place where no man has gone before: Mars.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Now that Russian wants in on the race to mars only with monkeys, what are the US,India,Japan and China going to do?

This will create a new space race only this time instead of the moon it will be Mars.

Will the US fake this as well like they did with the moon landing?

Your coments will appreciated.

www.universetoday.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

What is the plan with the monkeys? Are they simply trying to see the effects of the cosmic rays, since NASA is now saying that they might make a manned flight to Mars impossible?

reply to post by Karlhungis


NASA also said that Moon flight is impossible due the radiation hazards.. lol

So what if they send a monkey to Mars..?

We made a monkey President.



Them Russkies will have to get up earlier if they want to beat us at this game.

reply to post by mythatsabigprobe


OK, I laughed at that one.

this is a really bad idea. reminds me of the planet of the apes. the monkeys could mutate on mars. create a large intelligent civilization there. Years later, they could be capable of going back in time and return to earth, enslaving the earth and taking over. Maybe there's something to those films.

i really don't understand why they would send monkeys to mars. why not just send people instead?

half of ats would probably volunteer for that job even if they knew it was a one way ticket and they may even die on the way! look how many volunteered to clean up chernobyl knowing full well they were signing their own death warrants in doing so, but they did it for the good of everybody.

its really not hard to find volunteers for a manned mars flight! add you name here if you would go, knowing the possible consequences.....

reply to post by cnm1976



the lead-in you posted said that the Soviets eventually used monkeys...

but i've never heard of the Soviets sending monkeys into space.
But the USA decided that Chimpanzee's were the best test subjects,
and here's a video as proof: www.archive.org...

Ham and Enos were two Chimpanzees that paved the way for space flight by men... the current Russia space program may well be doing the same model for the proposed Mars journey... i.e. using Chimpanzees instead of monkeys , in preparation for men & women


[sidebar; i see that history is being sanitized & rewritten...
the USSR (aka; Soviets) conducted the space missions not the Russians as the article states,
Ethnic Russians among other peoples made up the population...but technically speaking Russia was only a geographic region of the USSR.]

reply to post by jedimiller


Or they die a horrible death...

Whichever comes first.

I think it's a good idea, or at least not a bad idea, provided every effort is made to ensure the monkey's survival, unlike Michael Nesmith. (...Hows that for a random bit of pop culture trivia).

^^ "Is Borris for real?? - where's Mars anyway"

^^ "I'm gonna volunteer for the Viagra trials personally, Mars is probably full of foreigners anyway"

I like the idea - wonder what they are planning, I wanna see em land there! with little space suits and all. Probably they just want em to fly by and return tho...

What possible benefit to using monkeys....?

Let's see, no safety concerns, no worries about the return trip, if they die it was a regrettable sacrifice, but hey - it's not like we have to send a medal to their families.

This sounds gimmicky to me.

reply to post by sty

I thought that NASA's claim of overexposure danger concerned prolonged mission - like a Lunar base plan where astronauts will have to spend a relatively long time. Not just: land guys, take photos, take samples, take off.

If moon landing was fake - it was a great fake, since USSR never claimed so with all the mutual propaganda war. And so people in the US can be proud if they landed or even if they did not.

Originally posted by ZeroKnowledge
reply to post by sty

 

I thought that NASA's claim of overexposure danger concerned prolonged mission - like a Lunar base plan where astronauts will have to spend a relatively long time. Not just: land guys, take photos, take samples, take off.

If moon landing was fake - it was a great fake, since USSR never claimed so with all the mutual propaganda war. And so people in the US can be proud if they landed or even if they did not.

Some how I can't envision us not getting 'busted' by some country or other if we had faked it.

"Humanity sacrifices more than 100 million animals a year in the name of health and beauty. It's time to think of an alternative to experiments with animals," says Andrei Zbarsky of the international nature conservation group WWF.

thats just terrible...

I've seen how this scenario plays out, and what happens is the warlike gorillas argue with the brainy chimpanzees about what to do about Charlton Heston and Marky Mark, and it ends in a big fight with world being destroyed.



"The only good human
is a dead human!

reply to post by justyc


This ATS Monkey volunteers.

Seriously though, I don't agree with this idea. There's nothing the monkeys can teach us in this journey that couldn't be done with an unmanned craft. They already had Mir and we all still have the ISS for the rest.

Better robotics & unmanned craft could tell us everything we want to know about Mars until such point we have a better understanding of what our presence there would achieve besides just making it there & back.


[edit on 14-4-2008 by verylowfrequency]

The monkey is extremely intelligent.

Another link for this story from another source:news.bbc.co.uk...