Love how China’s actually building infrastructure on their way to crewed lunar exploration instead of just trying to do their own flag-planting apollo
That’s an unfair comparison. The Apollo astronauts also practiced their golf swing and did donuts in a dune buggy!
Apollo was an amazing achievement and the best thing NASA’s crewed spaceflight program ever did, but it was also a rushed dead end of a program.
Trying to do another Apollo style mission in the 21st century like the US Artemis program would be if it ever gets off the ground is a total waste of time (and RS-25 engines)
Exactly, it looks like China has a serious plan to actually build a crewed base on the Moon and this could become an outpost for further exploration of the solar system. The Moon also makes far more sense for a colony than Mars in my opinion. It’s much easier to get to, which means that if anything goes wrong it’s actually possible to send help. There’s no atmosphere or dust storms to worry about. While there is superfine dust on the surface, you could just build the colony underground. In fact, it’s speculated that you could find existing lava tubes to pressurize which could save a huge amount of time. There’s really nothing humans would need to do on the surface.
If China is able to start industry on the moon and produce things on site that would be a complete game changer. Launching things from the Moon is far cheaper than doing it from Earth, and you could even build a space elevator there with current tech. At that point you can effectively send unlimited amount of stuff into orbit without even needing rockets. You could build stuff like giant space habitats, and ships that just stay in orbit, the possibilities are endless.
As problems go, I’d rather deal with superfine dust than Mars’ poisonous soil.
Chang’e 8 in 2028 is going to be really exciting, it’s supposed to have an ISRU experiment.
Indeed, and it looks like plants have been grown successfully using lunar soil already https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/scientists-grow-plants-in-lunar-soil/
Chang’e 8 is also bringing up an ecosystem in a box experiment to see how it does on the moon in addition to the ISRU printing stuff out of regolith experiment.
Can’t wait to see how that pans out!
If China is able to start industry on the moon
Then the US will push to end all industry on the moon to “preserve humanity’s heritage.”
🤣
Deleted my comment, made some assumptions based on a diagram that turns out may not have been accurate. I’ll look around for better info.
