While this would be great to start space exploration, there is no military incentive for this, and they're always the only ones with a blank check. Not sure that tourism is the option, maybe mining.
* Precision landing of large amount of troops, anywhere
* Ability to lift 250 tons -> precision landing of tanks and artillery, anywhere
* Deployment of kinetic impactors from space
Countering the ability for competitors to launch the capability's both you and I mentioned.
> Ability to lift 250 tons -> precision landing of tanks and artillery, anywhere
How does a foe distinguish one of these launches from an ICBM carrying nuclear warheads, so that they know not to launch their own in retaliation?
Missiles have to be launched and require much more acceleration to reach the moon and leave earths gravity.
To put it into perspective, imagine the moon can catapult 5000 massive rocks at earth every day. Earth can’t make that many missiles fast enough
Hypothetically a battery of missiles on the moon could be launched without being noticed by anyone on earth. With modern radar absorbing/scattering designs their transit could also be unnoticed. By the time they arrived at Earth they would be moving far faster then any ICBM could ever hope to achieve. Which puts them well outside the envelope of any existing/soon to exist missile defense system. You would also not have nearly enough time to launch a meaningful counterattack, and any that you did launch would be much easier for our moon based overlords to spot and counter.
Basically putting nukes on the moon breaks MAD pretty thoroughly for the foreseeable future.
My hope would of course be that opening space up would provide humans with sufficient rocks that we would stop trying to blow ourselves up over this rock. I don't expect that will be the case, would be nice though.
Small edit: Double checked the published reentry speeds of some modern ICBMs, ~8 km/s, it's a lot closer to the moon to earth reentry speed of ~10 km/s then I thought. Should point out though that the first is a ceiling and the latter is the floor. So my point still stands, it just means that the moon nazis will have to push a little harder to kill us all.
If your opponent puts missiles on the moon, put observation satellites in lunar orbit.
Surely stealth nuke satellites in earth orbit would be better than fixed positions on the moon? But even nuke satellites are way worse than land based missiles.
A co-ordinated satelite strike from ow orbit means all you satellites need to go over your target at the same time. In an emergency unless you happen to have a bunch of sates by chance over your target, on average it actually takes longer to wait until a given satelite is over a target before you can launch, compared to using ground based missiles. You can compensate by having about 20x as many missile sats as you actually need, so there's always enough over your targets. In theory that gives a small advantage over land based missiles, but that's hugely wasteful.
Putting any of that on the moon just means your enemy has 3 days to figure out what you're doing, or means if you need an emergency response it will arrive in 3 days time.
The only saving grace here is that if the US government contracted Elon Musk to secretly haul nukes to the moon, there'd be a smarmy tweet about it that same day.
Submarines.