China talking with European Space Agency about moon outpost

I'm impressed by that fact alone. Speaks well about ESA.

For the calibration comparison, I did enjoy The Player of Games; I felt the setup was a little clunky (the bit about provability of recordings by Minds should have been set up beforehand to give the reader a fair understanding of the world) and I struggled a little because I had little sympathy for the protagonist (and there's only really one) for a long time. But on the whole I did enjoy it; the part about wanting to know that victory is possible is a good crystalization of a genuine insight into human nature, and the vision of devoting one's life to something that completely catches the imagination. And the conclusions works very well as a "continuation of politics by other means" thing.

Private companies are only interested if there is short-term profit in these missions.

On what do you base this? If it's too expensive and dangerous for governments, with the ability to leverage overwhelming resources if they chose to and not care a bit whether any revenue were generated, how is it more likely that a severely resource constrained company likely limited by a profit (or at least constrained loss) motive will succeed?

Both countries are currently in desperate need of sizeable public works programs to keep people usefully occupied. Cost is proxy for human activity, but not necessarily a useful one. If we really are looking at massive near term automation, this is exactly the kind of proposal we can expect to see get off the ground...

Along similar lines, even if you ignore the fear and grief factor, a 20% fatality rate means you'll never create experienced astronauts.

I also really doubt that putting the risk that high would be particularly useful. Even the worst non-man-rated rockets out there have a failure rate of something like 10%, and those failures generally wouldn't kill the astronauts if their spacecraft had a launch escape system. The Space Shuttle's fatality rate was about 2%, and that was only because it was a vastly over-complex, fragile machine with no realistic abort modes in many phases of flight. No other spacecraft made or planned could fail in the ways the Shuttle did.

A government effort probably will be expensive, but only because they're slow to adapt. It will probably be quite some time before we see a(nother) reusable government rocket.

However, a private effort won't go anywhere, because there's no business case for a moon base, nor even a "dream big" case for an Elon Musk type figure. (Mars is a better target by nearly every measure for the second one.)

The best bet IMO would be a public-private partnership, with governments providing the basic goals and funding, and private companies providing the technology and services.

No doubt savings can be made, but the overall reliability of such a complex system isnt directly and smoothly related to cost.

We're very, very far from industrious robots on Earth, let alone on the moon or mars. We aren't even building mega-structures with robots here outside of trivial edge cases, why do you think we can do it on the moon?

Also from a cost per lbs perspective, swarms of giant building robots will cost more than the GDP of most nation states. A handful of astronauts with powertools working with ultra-light materials won't. For example, a small team can raise up Bigelow's mostly inflatable moon base concept in days:

http://spaceindustrynews.com/nasa-and-bigelow-aerospace-make...

No 50,000 lbs space mechs required.

Figure out how to make robots that can make robots, and just send those.

This means you can send up big robots that have little to no intelligence or automation, and are not much more than giant R/C cars with webcams. Seriously, we could just launch regular heavy construction equipment (earthmovers, bulldozers, etc.) rigged with cameras and remote controls; the real problem is the power source, since all those things run on fossil-fuel-burning engines here. So the challenge is making versions of these things which are battery-powered and can somehow be recharged with solar power.

Oh yeah, I guess the other big difficulty is dealing with the Moon dust (regolith), which is notorious for getting in everything and fouling things up. But that shouldn't be that hard to deal with; our heavy equipment (and even things like cars) are already designed to handle harsh environments and dust. We'd probably need different elastomeric seals though since there's no atmosphere on the Moon.

Edit: fixed Earth-to-moon and Earth-to-Mars delay times

Self replicating robots don't necessarily need to be super high tech. A well stocked machine shop plus a simple robot operator could manufacture 99% of it's own equipment. I once saw an interesting paper proposing a series of small robots on tracks that could produce more tracks and more robots.

Even if this process is very slow, it's exponential. Soon you have 10x as many robots as you started with. Then 100x, and then 1000x...

Sure, the Moon offers different challenges in spots, but it'll still let us validate things like growing crops, water reclamation, robotic construction, etc. with the ability to pop home if it all goes disastrously.

I think a long term colony on either of these worlds would be much safer below the surface where it would be shielded from cosmic rays etc.

If we can learn to build 'ant colony' style habitats on the Moon, we ought to be able to do the same on Mars once the cost of travel becomes lower.

Personally I would love to see both outcomes. But given a limited budget, going to Mars has the advantage of providing a (admittedly risky and uncertain) possibility of extending the survival of the human race, where as going back to the moon seems to provide more indirect benefits.

A Chinese / European moon base would probably breed a whole new generation of space nerds.

We could always go straight to Mars and do the research there, but that is the riskier strategy. We'd definitely learn what we need to, but it opens up more failure modes for any colonization mission, and managing the risk on Mars would be expensive. Mars colonization would already be straining our ability to engineer and fund, let alone doing it semi-blind.

Outer Space Treaty, Article II: http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/intr...

Unless a superpower bought one of this estates, the answer is most likely no.

I think those citing the "outer space treaty" and such are misled. The reason there's no private property on the moon right now is because there's absolutely no incentive to do so.

If we start colonizing the moon, and in particular if we start mining it you can be sure that the story will be much more different. Look at the many territorial disputes around the arctic (and its valuable resources).

China will absolutely lead on this now that we've put in an anti-science government. Expect them to lead on other things that were traditionally our domain too.

> THE ASSOCIATED PRESS (MATTHEW BROWN)

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/c7d78ca284eb4347821fe2825e347...

https://www.apnews.com/c7d78ca284eb4347821fe2825e347ff7/Chin...

The US sent half a dozen crewed missions to the moon, and made numerous unmanned missions.

There's no dark secret - space travel is complex and expensive, travel to the moon vastly more so than simply to orbit, and money is governed by politics. When the US had the prestige of possibly beating the Soviets to the moon , there was the political and popular will to do so. But eventually, the trick simply got old, and no longer seemed worth the expense.

Now take that, and add the exponential long term cost of a habitat and mining operation on the moon with 1970's / 1980's dollars and tech. I remember there being numerous plans for a moonbase at the time, it was discussed by NASA often, but the thing is, no one could figure out how to actually make it work reasonably cheaply without seeming like a lavish and pointless boondoggle to Congress.

Mars makes a more sense for a lot of reasons. A self-sustaining outpost on Mars is a _lot_ more plausible than the Moon. Due to the availability of carbon, there are a lot of substances that are a lot easier to make on Mars (notably, rocket fuel). The Martian atmosphere is 100x less dense than Earth's, but it is 100000000x more dense than the Moon's. While ~0.01 atm isn't a lot of pressure, it's certainly enough to be useful.

The Moon is closer, but really they're both firmly in "if something goes wrong, you'd better be able to fix it on your own" territory. It takes a bit more energy to get to Mars, but since you can use the atmosphere of Mars to slow down, the difference in energy requirements to get to the surface of each aren't vastly different.

If ESA and CNSA want to head to the Moon, great, I think any progress in that direction is great, but I think Mars is a much better goal (and the Moon isn't really "on the way" to Mars).