It’s unclear how China will use the win that would come from a successful Chang’e 7 mission, namely the visuals from its vehicles traversing the Moon’s South Pole. It has several options, one of the most intriguing being to claim that the territory explored by its rovers—establishing a keep-out zone for NASA.
That would be a clear provocation, but it could also further galvanize efforts in the United States to invest in Artemis and take the hard steps to accelerate its rollout. It would give Isaacman even more capital in his efforts to reform NASA.
One also suspects it may prompt people who do not view China’s efforts to “beat” NASA back to the Moon as a big deal to reconsider their position.
No worry. There’s nothing on the Moon. In the book, The Martian Chronicles, one of the Martians told an Earthling, “You rather come here than solve the problems on Earth.”
There is something on the Moon: He³. If China can develop fusion energy, they’ll want regolith at scale.
Would it be cost effective to mine it from the Moon?
By hand, certainly not. But by robot… Especially if the energy can be generated and used onsite, e.g. lunar data centres. Pretty easy to keep things cool on the Moon, after all.
But there’s the cost of sending and maintaining equipment on the Moon.
It would be cheaper than any given war, and end energy scarcity indefinitely. It’s just a matter of solving several engineering problems (fusion mainly) and mustering the political will.
Is it easy to cool? On the sunny side it’s hot. On the shady side it’s freezing.
Guess they could set up something in permanent shadow of a crater and dissipate heat through the ground somehow.
Compared to fusion energy and autonomous mining robots, that’s a pretty trivial engineering problem.
I like the idea of building into the Moon’s volcanic tubes. They’re probably very cold, and well protected.
I still don’t see it. Sure it might be there isn higher quantities than earth. But that’s still a long way to go for any material. Plus how do you get it back? Riding a ship back is doubling the cost and no one wants an orbital bombardment device.
No mayter Elon Musks hyperbole, bringing things up and down earths gravity well will always be horrendously expensive nand I don’t see how you’d recover the cost
We need mining in space to support our space efforts. It’s the other side of the same issue: space presence is unsustainable because even basics like food and water become horrendously expensive when you need to bring them up from earths gravity well.
…… but if you can mine water, split it into oxygen and hydrogen, use regolith for at least the bulk of your shelter, figure out how to grow your own food, you’ve cut the cost of space exploration in half
Any time I imagine work getting done in space I’m thinking robots. Maybe someday human space travel won’t massively suck, but there’s really not much point when robotic labour is so much more achievable. This is all speculative anyway, recall that job one would be to solve fusion energy.