Russia plans manned Moon missions by 2025, base by 2032...

1 September :: Russia plans to send manned missions to the Moon by 2025, with a subsequent goal of establishing a permanent base there between 2027 and 2032; initiative comes after US space agency NASA, in December 2006, announced plans to establish a permanently occupied base on the Moon, with manned missions beginning in 2020; the only manned missions to the Moon to date were part of NASA's Apollo program, which began in 1968, ending in the 1970s; Russia, US currently collaborate on missions to International Space Station, alternately sending up NASA Shuttles from Florida and Soyuz space capsules from Kazakhstan... According to Wired, a unique experiment in energy recycling, the 'Mechabolic' is having trouble getting started at the Burning Man festival in Nevada: "130-foot-long slug by the name of The Mechabolic is supposed to crawl across the Black Rock Desert at Burning Man, eating trash and creating gas and electricity. It is also supposed to sequester carbon in the form of an agriculturally useful char to balance whatever carbon dioxide it emits"... Washington Post reports Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has made strong showing early in Iowa, placing 2nd in an 11 August straw-poll; Huckabee, a former Baptist minister who once said in a debate he does not believe in evolution, served 10 years as Arkansas governor and is considered a moderate; told Bill Maher "I'd like to think the people of the country are looking for somebody that's not running because he's mad and angry," Huckabee says in an interview here. "My two strongest critics are the extreme right and the extreme left, both of whom say the same things about me"; of his pro-life views, he has remarked "for us to show true credibility, we must show as much compassion for the child sleeping under the bridge or in the back seat of the car as we do for the one in the womb", saying it's "about understanding the value of each individual life as having intrinsic worth"...