China's burgeoning space program plans to place astronauts on the moon before 2030 and expand the country's orbiting space station, officials said Monday.
China will beat the USA back to the moon, but 2030 is a little ambitious.
Silicosis from hell. Mars is the same but not as bad bc it has atmosphere and wind to move the dust around and grind the edges off a little, but it's still living in a world made of abrasive grit. It's impossible to overstate how insanely hazardous and unsuited for life anywhere else in the solar system is. All of this manned flight stuff is a hubristic waste of resources. Just send more robots ffs.
Mars' atmosphere also means that so as long as you've got electricity, you can use regular air compressor tech to blow a worksite relatively clean of dust, or blow most of the dust off a suit before closing up an outer airlock, etc. To try the same thing on the Moon means hauling along big tanks of some sort of inert gas, and carefully rationing usage.
Lunar colonization is an insane idea. The Moon is fantastic for a lot of science proposals. EM telescopes of all wavelengths on the far side where they're permanently shielded from Earth and shielded from the Sun for 2 weeks out of 4. Gravitational-wave detectors on tectonically stable ground that don't need vacuum tunnels built because above-ground is a natural vacuum. Infrared telescopes in the permanently-shadowed polar craters. Etc, etc, etc. The Moon is an amazing place for automated observatories. And of course the geology (selenology?) would be invaluable to understand how the Earth-Moon system evolved. But the Moon is a completely stupid idea from a colonization perspective.
Silicosis from hell. Mars is the same but not as bad bc it has atmosphere and wind to move the dust around and grind the edges off a little, but it's still living in a world made of abrasive grit. It's impossible to overstate how insanely hazardous and unsuited for life anywhere else in the solar system is. All of this manned flight stuff is a hubristic waste of resources. Just send more robots ffs.
Mars' atmosphere also means that so as long as you've got electricity, you can use regular air compressor tech to blow a worksite relatively clean of dust, or blow most of the dust off a suit before closing up an outer airlock, etc. To try the same thing on the Moon means hauling along big tanks of some sort of inert gas, and carefully rationing usage.
Lunar colonization is an insane idea. The Moon is fantastic for a lot of science proposals. EM telescopes of all wavelengths on the far side where they're permanently shielded from Earth and shielded from the Sun for 2 weeks out of 4. Gravitational-wave detectors on tectonically stable ground that don't need vacuum tunnels built because above-ground is a natural vacuum. Infrared telescopes in the permanently-shadowed polar craters. Etc, etc, etc. The Moon is an amazing place for automated observatories. And of course the geology (selenology?) would be invaluable to understand how the Earth-Moon system evolved. But the Moon is a completely stupid idea from a colonization perspective.