China has successfully deployed the world's first three-satellite constellation on the distant retrograde orbit (DRO) of the Earth-Moon system, marking a milestone in the country's deep-space exploration capabilities, scientists announced at an academic symposium in Beijing on Monday.
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!
Then the US will push to end all industry on the moon to “preserve humanity’s heritage.”
🤣