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Comment by nitwit005 | Hacker News Reader

The practical part of space flight is launching satellites, and weapons. Both countries are already doing both.

If we're discussing manned missions to the moon or Mars, as an American I'd prefer China spent all the money and the US didn't bother. It'd be cool to see it happen, but no one can identify practical benefits, aside from a political win.

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You are missing that the money and research into figuring out how to solve many engineering and scientific challenges related to the missions had tremendous benefit to industry later.

As we gain ability to do my re in space more cheaply it will get more important

It's not clear that concentrating so much money on a single government project fosters more benefit than having the money go to a variety of other projects. It is easy to see the items developed by something like the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program, but we often miss the innovations created by private industry when you compare a similar total spend (Bastiat's "seen and unseen"). One example of the alternative is how (private) demand for cellular telephony has triggered many innovations, from powerful and efficient microcontrollers to bright LCD screens, and fast-charging lithium-ion batteries.

I'm thinking that Apollo covered 90% of the useful spin-offs from developing tech for manned travel to the moon or Mars. And at least 90% of what's left was either covered by the ISS, or could be covered by a few small LEO space stations.

The economic cases for manned moon or Mars programs look really iffy these days. The US has poured tens of $billions down the SLS rat hole, with very little to show for it. And Wienersmith's A City on Mars is a pretty damning dissection of the whole concept of Martian colonies.

The SLS is widely understood to be less about research and development, and more about pork barreling, and jobs program. I don't buy that humanity should avoid investing in space travel because US Congress and surrounding governmental beaurcracy is not running projects effectively. That argument would stop just about any human activity.

It's pretty difficult to predict what spinoffs would come from attempting to put a colony on Mars. I would imagine to succeed we would need to solve a lot of challenges with human biology, genetic engineering, automation, and many novel engineering solutions.

But economics is not the only reason to do things, and I bet you don't expect everything humans do to have a purely economic rational.

If you want to do research to benefit industry, you can just do so. There's no particular reason research funding tied to human space flight should get better results.

That take is unbelievably shortsighted.

A Far Side lunar base is not some cool sci fi brag. It is a massive strategic advantage, and brushing it off misses everything that actually matters.

The Far Side is the only place in the Earth Moon system where you can hide military hardware and basically disappear. No optical tracking, no radar, no interception. The Moon itself becomes a giant wall of rock that blocks sensors, lasers, and signals. It is the closest thing to perfect concealment anyone is ever going to get in space.

From that position, gravity is on your side. Sending kinetic weapons toward Earth takes almost no energy. Sending anything from Earth to the Moon takes a huge amount of fuel just to fight the gravity well. The attacker on the surface is always at a disadvantage, and the lunar side barely has to spend anything to strike.

A base on the Moon also survives whatever happens on Earth. Even a full scale nuclear exchange leaves it untouched. That means guaranteed retaliation. It becomes a true third strike platform, something no one can wipe out in a first strike. It locks in deterrence in a way that completely changes the strategic balance.

And if one country gets there first, mutual deterrence is over. They hold an untargetable, unreachable launch point that the rest of the planet cannot neutralize. That is not a symbolic win. It is unilateral control over the highest ground humanity has access to.

I honestly do not know why some people do not see it. This is literally rewriting Earth geopolitics. For hundreds of years we worked within Mackinder’s logic: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; who rules the World Island commands the World.

With a lunar base it becomes: Who rules the Moon commands cislunar space; who commands cislunar space commands Earth orbit; who commands Earth orbit commands the Earth.

This is not about pride or prestige. It is about who controls the one location in the solar system that offers absolute strategic dominance. Whoever controls the Moon controls the high ground.

Good luck competing with China if they get there first.

EDIT: Apparently posting six comments in thirty minutes counts as "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks. " and whoever decided that is a proper knob. I got throttled again, so if you reply, I can't respond anymore for now.

This doesn’t make any sense. You must be trolling or a bot.

What good does inter-planetary bombardment do me? I already have enough nukes to destroy the world. I mean it’s a bit redundant

You open by calling me a bot, which is an odd way to start a serious argument.

It isn’t about extra ways to blow things up. It’s about survivability and leverage. A platform you can’t detect or preempt changes deterrence dynamics, just like subs do. The advantage comes from being untargetable, not from adding more warheads.

But missiles from the moon would take way longer to arrive than ICBMs, so more time to intercept them.

> Good luck competing with China if they get there first.

The French, the English, the Dutch and the Portuguese all got to Asia.

Which one was first and which one(s) were last to leave is not the same.

The far side of the moon doesn't have a magic "dibs, it's mine" quality. It's big, and it's an extreme environment.

By "there first" I don't mean - whoever sets the foot there. I assumed that was obvious.

"If a thing which is remote and in the future takes the characteristic of being done first by my adversary then the mostly likely outcome is a marvel universe dystopia endgame where everything we do is fruitless and they win and we lose"

Look, I get you don't think you wrote hyperbole, but you did. Getting to a strategic capability based on far side occupancy and assuming that automatically is non competitive and incurs first to file wins outcome.. please. The most likely outcome is an antarctica treaty. The next most likely outcome is broadly speaking comparable capabilities and MAD.

By all means wargame your own vision where China does it solo and nobody else can compete.

I'm not talking about planting a flag and saying "dibs." I'm talking about the first country that reaches actual sustained capability, moving mass, building infrastructure, supplying it, and controlling the surrounding space. Whoever gets there first shapes the rules, because that's how every strategic domain has worked so far!

That's why "just let China have the Moon" doesn't really hold up. These places are only neutral when no one has the power to enforce anything. Once a country can build, maintain, and defend a Far Side installation, the incentives shift. If multiple nations reach that level around the same time, fine, you get something like MAD. But if one gets there years ahead of everyone else, it's not going to look like Antarctica, it's going to look like someone taking the high ground before anyone else can contest it.

A concealed base with perfect third strike capability that costs a zillion dollars per bullet to load with ammo is actually not that useful.

That Far Side base is irrelevant unless is can be supplied, at scale. Talk to a few folks who served in Afghanistan about the costs and miseries of long logistical pipelines to great-in-theory locations.

Then, the base has to easily project serious military power to places that matter to us. Lunar escape velocity is ~2.4km/s, which is not trivial. After that, transit time to Earth is multiple days. Vs. current ICBM's can put nuclear warheads anywhere, in under an hour, without actually achieving LEO.

BTW - if nation C can haul enough stuff to the Far Side to build a substantial base, then obviously it's neither untargetable nor unreachable for nation U.

> The Far Side is the only place in the Earth Moon system where you can hide military hardware and basically disappear. No optical tracking, no radar, no interception.

What prevents someone from sending a Lunar-orbiting imaging satellite to image everything on the Far Side? The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has already been imaging the Far Side for over a decade.

I agree with your general points about it being a difficult location to get to, but if it's possible to put regular satellites in Lunar orbit, surely its possible to park some warheads too just in case...

If a big power gets there first, they’re not going to treat lunar orbit like some kind of shared international space. They’d treat it as their turf. At that point you can’t just assume you can drop an imaging satellite into whatever orbit you want they’d have both the motive and the capability to deny access.

Disagree on the technical aspects. It'd be inexpensive to monitor adversary military activities on the lunar far side: one lunar satellite would do it. The gravity well is not trivial, and any launches from the surface (should this become a thing) would be immediately visible from high orbit, by the intense infrared glow of rocket combustion exhaust. (Exact same way nuclear early warning systems work on Earth, for that matter[0]).

Agree that the general concept is a serious one, but I don't think the numbers work out on your specific implementation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Support_Program#Histor...

don't nuclear submarines achieve similar strategic benefits?

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