
China to build moon station in 'about 10 years' - chdaniel
https://phys.org/news/2019-04-china-moon-station-years.html
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SurrealSoul
Very exciting, for anyone who didn't know today is china's space day!

Even if it takes 10 years of valve time, its still exciting to hear something
like that happening in my lifetime. I'll be able to hopefully witness the
first human born off of earth :)

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duxup
Is there any advantage to keeping humans on the noon long term at this point?

Research wise is there much to do?

I imagine regular maintenance and such would take a lot resources.

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dalbasal
Arguably, there's no advantage to sending humans to space at all. Robots can
do the work.

But space exploration isn't (just) about science. It's about nationalism, or
post nation humanism, or our 100k yr tradition of exploring new frontiers..etc
etc.

You can't judge this (or Apollo) based on strictly rational grounds. There's a
human spirit element, and humans are still better at that than robots.

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sevensor
This could be the start of a land rush in space, driven as you suggest by
nationalism, but with a distinct economic aspect as well. Cislunar orbits are
lucrative property. A moonbase is sort-of positioned to dominate them. (Maybe
more in the imagination than in fact, but thinking about position in terms of
velocity and gravity wells is hard.)

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ycombonator
Communist Death Star ?

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moate
That's no moon, that's a space station. No wait, that's a space station on a
moon.

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Aloha
You'll pardon me, I'm not holding my breath - there are many logistical
challenges to solve, most of them have not been solved yet.

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simonh
They do have the advantage of operating a fully tested and proven human-rated
launch vehicle family, which has also successfully orbited a space station.
That puts them significantly ahead of the US. Throwing a small Salyut-style
station in Lunar orbit would be a great achievement, but isn't a huge step up
technically from putting one in Earth orbit.

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moate
But that's not what they're talking about. They're saying they're going to
build a station ON the moon.

