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if China says "no" to this unilateral yoinking of moon rocks by the burger reich, I am sure they will be painted as unreasonable
if China says "no" to this unilateral yoinking of moon rocks by the burger reich, I am sure they will be painted as unreasonable
Wow, watch space investment suddenly become important again to avoid commie moon bases (again)
It'll be funny to watch the US insist that the "private sector" is better for space exploration then funnel billions into SpaceX only for Musky to pocket the money and do nothing while China is establishing actual moon colonies.
Afraid I gotta be a killjoy here; we're not gonna see a colony on the moon (or any other celestial body) at any point this century. To make a long-term habitable settlement, you'd need to either foster an ecosystem from scratch, or use industrial processes to supplement all the biochemicals and compounds and stuff needed to keep a person alive. The former would be very difficult. It would take (at the very least) decades of experimental ecological husbandry just to figure out how to start.
The latter is just flat out beyond anybody's industrial capacity - like, orders of magnitude beyond. Everything we produce and enjoy today as industrialized societies is supplemental. A rounding error. The manufacture and processing of the countless things needed to be alive, all that biochemical work is done by every living thing in the ecosystem. We have only a dim understanding of the processes behind the things we know we need, and there's certainly more we have yet to notice.
You're right of course, I shouldn't have said "colony" because that implies a level of self-reliance that we're a very long way away from meeting. Moon "base" probably would've been a better term, like a space station, just on the moon, somewhere wholly reliant on supplies from earth to function.
It would be extremely funny if America's moon landing (already postponed to 2027) gets further postponed, and China's moon landing (slated for "before 2030") gets pushed forward