Help: the Cold War 2.0 daughter of the terrible war in Ukraine has suddenly gone into orbit! First the decision of the European Space Agency to stop cooperation for the ExoMars mission, then the repeated threat from Moscow to bring down the International Space Station in a random place in the Western world, causes sanctions against Russia, and now something completely different: the Russian space agency Roscomos makes it known that it will send a mission to Mars by itself. This was announced by the director of the program Dimitry Rogozin (same surname as the character of theMoron of Dostoevsky who, left without a ruble, returns to the fold to claim his father’s inheritance).
“We will lose several years, but we will copy our landing module, equip it with an Angara launch vehicle and conduct this research expedition from the new Vostochny Cosmodrome site independently,” Rogozin told Telegram. The director of the program then published a copy of the letter in which the CEO of ESA, the Austrian Josef Aschbacher, informs the Russians of the decision to suspend the ExoMars project. “Indeed, this is a very sad event for all space enthusiasts. This means that the joint Russian-European mission to Mars scheduled for September 2022 has been canceled ”, underlined Rogozin.
Russians alone on Mars, in short, while here on planet Earth we are talking more modestly about an endless humanitarian tragedy and about whether the “democracy” established in Russia by Vladimir Putin has more to do with Nazism or fascism. Vladislav Inozemtsev, a Russian economist, director of the Moscow Center for Post-industrial Studies, favors the second option. These are really difficult times for satire, the desire to smile about the distortions of the world is close to zero, but it is a moment to go with the mind to the only great precedent of autarchic superpower landed on the Red Planet: the Fascists on Mars by Corrado Guzzanti. The uniforms are similar, the irredentist rhetoric the same, the doubt one: who knows what the Martians think. After the biggest pandemic since the Spanish and the most grueling NATO-Russia standoff since the missile crisis, we would only miss the war of the worlds.