DarthShady wrote:PeZook, at the rate we are going, how long will it take FASTA to get us on the moon?
Let's see...
If the take historical failure rates, we'll have at least a dozen R-7 flights before we figure out how to make heavy liquid fuelled orbital boosters which won't blow up.
At a rate of one test flight every two weeks, that's six months still. So, first manned flight in March 2009.
Proton development will start when the R-7 is proven and reliable (because we don't want to build the proton only to repeat some dumb engineering mistake which will come up one test later). Meanwhile, the R-7 will be running the Mercury and Soyuz programs.
I figure 8-10 Mercury flights, manned and unmanned: and make no mistake, that's at least a year. Soyuz will have to wait untill we close Mercury: but we'll be able to make two versions at the same time (like Gemini and Apollo). So another year or two, let's say two for safety.
So 2013 should see us on the Moon. Unless it turns out things like computer modelling and remote sensor technology (it's way easier to find flaws after a rocket explosion if you have a gazillion sensors on it during flight) cut some development time short.