That is a very fair point. While I have no skin in the game, it is fascinating to see if the Us with Artemus or China with Chang'e will be the first to make it back to the Moon manned.
At this point is is looking like the winners will merely be those that have the least loses and launch pad loses can take a long time to recover from.
Credit to Space X, they have become very good and fixing launch pads with Starship. What used to be year(s) long pauses, now only take a few months.
The best outcome is we get two Moon bases. I say this as someone who remains a fairly patriotic American. But we need competition and, more darkly, we need a backup.
The South Pole of the moon will end up one giant mega city due to it's constant sunlight. It will be a lot easier to get there once there is even one landing strip.
It "only" takes about 8 million metric tons of aluminium to put a conductive aluminium loop of 1Ω resistance around the moon's equator*, solving all the energy problems that the poles are usually supposed to solve.
While this is way more than we can do any time soon**, that's the kind of mass you'd need to get up there to build the infrastructure for a colony of just high tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands of people, which is well short of "mega city".
** Last I looked, SpaceX's website was listing 100 million USD per ton to the moon; your guess is as good as mine if or when they'll deliver anything close to the price Musk suggests for serious colonisation efforts
I don’t know why we are wasting all this money making it habitable for humans when robotics have taken such strides the last few decades. Manned missions made sense when we didn’t have these compute and robotic abilities we have today. Now, they are undue risk and cost and offer no real functionality but some misplaced national pride perhaps.
Because it's better for Earth's biosphere to mine things like lithium on the moon rather than polluting our biosphere. The North and South pole of the moon also serves as an excellent staging ground to put solar energy collectors that can then transmit continuous concentrated power to Earth.
The moon is dangerous because there's no people and civilization is 5 days away at best but if there was already civilization at the moon you wouldn't think it was dangerous.
On top of that the materials on the moon are already "on the high ground" meaning you don't need to spend a lot of money on propellant to get it into orbit. So building space habitats and delivering them into an appropriate orbit on the moon is a tiny fraction of the fuel needed from Earth. To put this into perspective the Apollo Lunar Module only needed 2.2 Tons of propellant to get the upper part of it back into orbit to meet up with the service module. 2.2 tons of propellant is basically nothing with the scales we are talking about.
On top of that if we could produce the propellant on the moon the costs and logistics and difficulty of all of this drop significantly.
So in short the best possible way to lower the risk, cost, and provide functionality is to establish civilization on the moon and get to the industrial age there as quickly as possible.
We're doing it regardless of what you naysayers will say about it because it's the right thing to do for a thousand different reasons. And we're doing the robot thing too. At the same time.
Our biology precludes that. We are adapted to life on earth. Sad to say but we should be seeding tardigrades, not humans, if we care about sustaining earth life after earth is destroyed.
We use technology to do many things we are not biologically capable of. If we can use technology to remotely explore inhospitable environments, we can also use technology to wrap ourselves in a hospitable environment.
You could land at 500 km/h on wheels and use breaks to stop. This makes it much safer and lowers how much propellant you need to bring to the moon by a lot. Similarly it makes getting back into lunar orbit much safer and easier because you can use electric motors to propel a craft to around 500 km/h before ditching the wheels and starting your chemical rockets. This lowers your propellant mass by 30%.
Also the landing strip can be designed to slowly go up hill which could help with the breaking phase as well.
You can do that but it would require a track that is tens of kilometers long along with a magnetic levitation technology. My suggestion is something we can do right now with a basic landing strip. But yes a meglev is the end game. Needs to reach 8,570 km/h for moon orbital velocity.
The Chinese will build a moon base, as a sign from the Chinese government to the Chinese people that China is capable of cutting-edge engineering and science (notably a demonstration to their own citizens - when was the last time you heard about the Chinese space stations outside China?).
America seems a bit shaky in their determination to actually build a moon base, though having Jared Isaacman as administrator gives hope. But regardless of whether America is currently on track, a successful Chinese moon base won't stay without answer
> when was the last time you heard about the Chinese space stations outside China?
Last year, when negative news of delayed astronaut return was all over American news, e.g. [1][2]. Apparently makes American astronauts onboard Boeing ship being stuck in space less embarrassing.
I will give you that. I will be more than happy to see both reach there in mutual success. I do fear the blow back of the more tribalistic folks that will see it as a threat rather than success.
Yes, in that sense SpaceX has really benefited from having the Starbase site. My understanding is that one of the reasons pad rebuilds take so long at the Cape is that they have to work around everyone else's schedule.
At this point is is looking like the winners will merely be those that have the least loses and launch pad loses can take a long time to recover from.
Credit to Space X, they have become very good and fixing launch pads with Starship. What used to be year(s) long pauses, now only take a few months.