Russia Plans To Go On the Moon
Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, has ambitious plans for the future, including a manned mission to the Moon. 

On Friday, in a press conference, Anatoly Perminov, the head of Roskosmos, has revealed the future plans of the space agency for the next three decades.

According to media reports, Anatoly Perminov said that Russia plans to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2025. Also Russia has plans to build a permanent manned base on lunar soil, until 2032. And the Moon is just the first step, as a manned flight to Mars is scheduled for after 2035.

Together with European Space Agency, Russia is already organizing a simulated manned mission to Mars by placing six volunteers in a sealed capsule on Earth.

For the moment, NASA is planning to launch an unmanned mission to the Moon in the fall of 2008. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is a robotic mission designed to create a new type of comprehensive, digital map of the Moon's features and resources, necessary to cost-effectively, but mostly will focus on selecting safe landing sites for future human missions. Also NASA hope to return the Moon by 2020.

US and Russia are not the only countries which are planning missions to the Moon, but the other countries are considering unmanned missions. Earlier this year British space scientists have said they plan to undertake the country's first mission to the moon by the end of the decade. Germany also plans an unmanned flight to the moon by 2013. Beside Germany and UK, China, Japan, India and Italy have similar plans.

Beside the unmanned mission, China and Japan are planning also to launch astronauts to the Moon by 2022 and respectively 2030.

Also, as outlined in its future strategy, Roskosmos intends to complete the construction of its section of ISS by 2015 and the space agency also plans "major modernisation" to the Soyuz craft.

Perminov also revealed that in 2009 the first Russian tourist will make a trip to the International Space Station. The head of Russian space agency didn’t disclose the identity of the man, but he said it’s a young businessman and politician.

The tourist space flights are operated by the Russian space agency together with US-based company  Space Adventures and a price of a flight to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft is now $30 millions

Until now there have been only five space tourists. The last space tourist was Charles Simonyi, 58, a Hungarian-American billionaire who flew to the ISS earlier this year. His predecessors are Denis Tito (2001) and Gregory Olsen (2005), both of the United States; Mark Shuttleworth of South Africa (2002) and the world's first female space tourist Anousheh Ansari, a U.S. citizen of Iranian origin, who flew to the ISS in 2006.