Russia has sights set on manned moon landing by 2030 and more

(Image Credit: Philipp Salzgeber)

Space.com is reporting that Russia plans on sending cosmonauts to the moon as well as unmanned spacecrafts to Mars, Jupiter and Venus by 2030.  To date, the United States is still the only country who has successfully landed landers on Mars.  Considering the recent launch failures in Russia, these plans seem very ambitious.

These plans were detailed in a strategy document by Russia's Federal Space Agency (Roscomos), according to the Russian Newspaper Kommersant on Tuesday March 13th.

In addition they want a new rocket called Angara to become their main launch vehicle by 2020 that will replace Soyuz and Proton rockets (that have been around since the 1960s).  Soyuz is only a 3 passenger spaceship, while Angara will have a 6 seat spaceship.  Roscosmos is also considering building a space station around the Moon by 2030.  Russia is still our key partner with the $100 billion International Space Station, which is only supposed to remain active until 2020.