China to build moon station in 'about 10 years' | Hacker News Reader

China to build moon station in 'about 10 years'

phys.org

50 pointschdaniel23 comments

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 :)

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.

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.

I certainly can understand the PR type reasons.

Still I can ask what more logical reasons there might otherwise be for doing a thing.

A landing would seem significantly cheaper, maybe not in PR result, but a long term moon base seems unusually costly.... assuming that is what this actually ends up being.

Obviously China wants to go beyond a "hey us too" type event.

Humans can vastly outperform robots at research in space. The main advantage of robots is lower cost and risk. It's ok if a robot blows up.

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.)

Have robots build a hydrolysis and refueling station on Earth first, and I'll believe they can do the work in space.

The lunar south pole mentioned in the article has two features which could make it economically important: cold traps, possibly containing large quantities of water ice [1] and nearby peaks of nearly eternal light [2].

Put the two together, and you can build a solar-powered ice mining, oxygen- and hydrogen-producing operation to fuel your rockets and keep your astronauts properly hydrated and oxygenated. Even if you're only interested in near-Earth space, this could be cheaper than lifting the same amount of stuff from the bottom of our gravitational well.

But before you can do all that, you need to explore the place in detail, and then build the facility. Doing it all using only robots could be harder than having a few humans on the ground.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_south_pole#Cold_traps

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_of_eternal_light#Lunar_so...

Seems like "longer" visits would be in order first.

Doing it with robots would be almost comically hard.

So would doing it with humans... They're so pesky with all their whiny "I need a pressure vessel, oxygen, water, and food to live!" nonsense.

With humans, hard as in very very expensive. With robots hard as in “very very expensive and not sure if possible, actually”. IMHO

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

Because it's cool?

To play that mindset out to its logical conclusion, is there any advantage to human beings continuing to be alive at all? The whole point of this thing is to have fun and distract ourselves from inevitable mortality. There is no particular end state of existence to which we should be optimizing beyond human enjoyment and enrichment.

"Moon to Mars" is hot concept at NASA right now: https://www.nasa.gov/specials/moon2mars/ .

The idea is essentially: send people to the moon (to stay) in the 2020's, and then to Mars in the 2030's. In addition to being interesting in its own right, the technology that we need to develop to permanently occupy the moon will be applicable to future missions to Mars (and other parts of the solar system). It's an easier intermediate step, and a moon base can serve as a "gateway" to further exploration.

The Moon and Mars are two separate goals for the foreseeable future. It'll be at least a lifetime before we can launch Mars-bound payloads from the Moon as reliably or cheaply as we can from Earth.

Making one dependent on the other is bad for both. If you hobble a Moon mission with Mars exploration requirements, then that's resources wasted that could go directly to Lunar exploration. If you hobble a Mars program with a dependency on a Moon base, then you ensure that you'll die before seeing a human on Mars.

Only disadvantages, from a health of the human standpoint. https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace

Communist Death Star ?

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

Why the downvote ? Can has no humour ?

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.

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.

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

The same could be said about the U.S. going to the moon back in the 1960s.

For the sake of humanity, I hope they make it. For the sake of humanity, I hope the U.S. beats them there first.

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