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Friday, 5 July, 2002, 23:06 GMT 00:06 UK
Russia plans to put people on Mars
A Mars landing could come 45 years after the Moon walk
Russian space officials have announced an ambitious project to send people to Mars by 2015.
Scientists have planned the basics of a 440-day mission by six people which would break a huge barrier in space exploration. Preliminary talks have been held with possible international partners for the plan which Russia said would cost around $20bn and for which it could contribute 30%. Vitaly Semyonov, head of the Mars project at the Keldysh Research Centre, said: "It must be an international project.
The outline of the plan calls for two spaceships - one manned with six crew members and one for cargo. Anatoly Grigoryev, director of the Institute of Medical-Biological Problems which works with all of Russia's cosmonauts, said three members of the team would descend to Mars, while the other three would remain in orbit. 'Encouraging signs' Russian space officials said they were receiving encouraging signs of interest from Nasa and European counterparts.
Alain Fournier-Sicre, head of the European Space Agency's permanent mission in Russia, said he had discussed the project with Russian officials. "We are still very far away," he said. "But this kind of programme is a long-term initiative for every space agency in the world." Nasa told BBC News Online last month that the administration was doing what it needed to send humans to Mars at some point.
The Odyssey's discovery of water on Mars also heightened interest and added possibilities for manned missions to Mars. Russian scientists have long dreamed of landing humans on Mars, but even in the heyday of the Soviet space programme its attempts to reach the Red Planet were so marked by failure that people began talking of a "Mars curse". More recently, Russia tried to launch a $300m spacecraft to Mars in 1996, hoping to show they were still a force in the space discovery despite the Soviet break-up. But the craft suffered an engine failure after launch and crashed in the Pacific Ocean.
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