Have we lost the Moon vs. China?

[Tywin]

What do you think?

[spacenut]

Nope.  Starship and SLS are on the way.  China still has a ways to go.  They will need in space assembly.  Sure they are sending probes and satellites to make news, but they seem to be building a space station right now, slowly. 

China is currently having internal problems.  They haven't released their Covid information in months.  Rumor has it that there have been several explosions in various areas in their western provinces.  Then reports are that people are hording food because they believe there will be a food shortage.  Internal problems can cause cuts to their space program.  Also, reports are their economy is not in the best of conditions. 

Most of my information comes from The South China Morning Post.  Also:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/20/china/china-shenyang-explosion-intl-hnk/index.html

You can Google a lot of this information.  Also the US is China's largest trading partner, if we stop or slow down buying, it affects their economy more than ours.  With inflation here, many in the US will start cutting back spending to pay for utilities, gasoline, and food. 

[Robotbeat]

I doubt it can be as bad as the Soviet Union was when they were kicking the US’s butt early on in the space race.

China probably doesn’t have the resources for a big Moon base, but I don’t think they’re technically worse off than the US in terms of schedule until first Chinese person on the Moon. Their successful lunar sample return should be a wake up call. It uses the Apollo lunar orbit rendezvous approach but miniaturized.

[kevinof]

Nope. I won’t count on SLS to save the day given it’s costs and limited launches but I think SpaceX with lots of help from NASA will get Starship flying and it provides a really unique and flexible platform. And China has nothing that comes close, even in the next  20 years.

[StormtrooperJoe]

This isn't even a race. Neither China nor Russia have real plans for manned lunar missions. Sure they can point at hypothetical design references missions all they want, but without any funding they might as well be trying to go to alpha centauri.

As things are now, I bet it would take the Chinese ≈10 years WITH a well funded program, or a few years less with an unlimited budget crash program, to put taikonauts on the moon. This is not to disparage the technological abillities of the Chinese, however they are simply not well posititioned to perform such a feat.

[Robotbeat]

This isn't even a race. Neither China nor Russia have real plans for manned lunar missions. Sure they can point at hypothetical design references missions all they want, but without any funding they might as well be trying to go to alpha centauri.

As things are now, I bet it would take the Chinese ≈10 years WITH a well funded program, or a few years less with an unlimited budget crash program, to put taikonauts on the moon. This is not to disparage the technological abillities of the Chinese, however they are simply not well posititioned to perform such a feat.

Describe the mission sequence of China’s sample return mission.

[akm]

No. It's just a picture. We are building hardware.

Sent from my Pixel 4a using Tapatalk

[dglow]

Have we lost he moon to China?

Define "lost". If having to share the moon means we've lost, then probably yes.

[cdebuhr]

No. It's just a picture. We are building hardware.

Sent from my Pixel 4a using Tapatalk

What are you responding to, exactly?  I hope not the previous post about China's sample return mission, because if so, you couldn't be more wrong.  It's most definitely not just a picture.  It's not even "just" hardware.  It's a completed mission.  It's samples from the moon, already being studied by scientists around the world.  The first in nearly 50 years.

My apologies if you were referring to something else completely.

[goretexguy]

Have we lost he moon to China?

Define "lost". If having to share the moon means we've lost, then probably yes.

Unless 'we' were going to claim the moon exclusively for ourselves, and be willing and able to enforce that exclusivity, 'we' were going to share the moon anyway. By this definition, we lost before we started.

[ThereIWas3]

Sure they can point at hypothetical design references missions all they want, but without any funding they might as well be trying to go to alpha centauri.

I notice that NASA does not have funding for Artemis landings either.

[TorenAltair]

Define "we" please.

[Doesitfloat]

Just checked . It's still there. Not Lost

[eeergo]

Define "we" please.

This. Wonder if it's disdain for the majority of the world, or honest overlook that there are more spacefaring nations than the United States of America, as are the nationalities of space enthusiasts contributing, reading and taking this forum as reference - including inestimable Chinese insiders.

[Vultur]

If the question is "first to the Moon", well, that was decided 52 years ago.

If the question is "next human landing on the Moon", well, who knows?

However, there's no "loss" if there's no competition. Even the polar areas of the Moon are rather large, and no near-term plan would use any significant part of the polar regions or the polar volatiles.

Due to SLS launch cadence, Artemis as currently planned won't scale to large scale settlement or economic exploitation of the Lunar poles. If it shifts to Starship later this decade, more could be done, but I don't think the US government has a need/desire for that. National prestige could be satisfied with far less.

There's room for far more ISS/CSS/Gateway scale bases, or even McMurdo scale ones, on the Moon than there are nations on Earth.

[wannamoonbase]

Before we cede the moon to China, perhaps look into their population demographics.

We are a few years away from their working population starts decreasing sharply.  They can still carry out large initiatives but it's going to be difficult for them.

There is a lot of hysteria over China, I think it's over exaggerated but if it can be motivation for other countries to get off center and finally return to the moon to stay, then I'm ok with it.

[dglow]

Nothing would please me more than to see some level of collaboration between CNSA and NASA on the moon. The US Congress locked China out of the ISS, but it can't do the same for a planetary body.

We have plenty of the Great Power race happening on Earth. Let's keep it here.

[su27k]

This thread should be merged with the US and China Lunar exploration thread over at space policy, and that thread should be moved back to this section. Moving thread to space policy will just make it wither and die, then we have duplicate threads popping up again, let's stop trying to move things to space policy where only a minority of members can participate.

[su27k]

No. It's just a picture. We are building hardware.

What are you responding to, exactly?

I assume he's referring to the image in the first post, that's a rendering of China's lunar base.

[JohnFornaro]

This isn't even a race. Neither China nor Russia have real plans for manned lunar missions.

Define "Real".

https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-aims-for-a-permanent-moon-base-in-the-2030s#toggle-gdpr

"China Aims for a Permanent Moon Base in the 2030s Lunar megaproject to be a stepping-stone to the solar system"