Secretly (?) I'm hoping for another "space race"— this time between the U.S. and China. I'm hoping this for the U.S.'s sake. I'm hoping that good can come of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/us/politics/spacex-us-moo...
You don't hear about it much, for some reason.
https://kalshi.com/markets/kxmoonman/manned-mission-to-the-m...
So even if its just a jobs program with a neat outcome, we'd have to deal with tax reform first, I'd imagine.
Those are orbits with 100+ year dynamic lifetimes (as is regularly discussed, i.e. ref [d]). It's true that they could actively deorbit them; that's the lifespan of passive debris that fails to actively deorbit. (Ref [d] also discusses spent rocket stages in this context, and China's uniquely bad behavior there).
I assume the main motive behind this is basic business economics. China doesn't have reusable boosters; the ones that might succeed this month won't reach Falcon 9 levels of mass production, and launch cadence, for several years. They're on an expensive on-ramp. To a first-order simplification 1,100 km orbits need only 1/4th as many satellites for the same coverage as 550 km orbits.
[a] https://www.space.com/china-first-launch-internet-satellite-...
[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guowang
[c] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/08/china-may-have-taken-a...
[d] https://spacenews.com/chinas-megaconstellation-launches-coul...
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.
As we gain ability to do my re in space more cheaply it will get more important
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
What good does inter-planetary bombardment do me? I already have enough nukes to destroy the world. I mean it’s a bit redundant
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Seems like every month there is ~30 launches (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight#Orbital_la...), November has mostly US and China, but also have (or will have) India, Turkey, Japan, Russia and Italy as countries with launches. Pretty great to see that more nations are getting involved.
Randomly, I stumbled upon the Shijian series of satellites, apparently featuring an arm that could tow other satellites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shijian
But only two investing in high-cadence, high-mass capabilities.
We've lost the shipbuilding race, auto race, drone race, without anyone in DC actually noticing. Most Americans don't even realize China has a manned space station. If China had a presence on the moon, would that wake up congress, or would they just put out a few tweets and go back to cultural dramatics?
(Maybe you are just joking, but I wonder about the idea.)
When I was a kid, it was a general assumption in science fiction that living in zero-G or low-G would provide health/longevity benefits. Our experience with the ISS shows that microgravity is bad for health (muscle atrophy, bone loss, vision problems). It is not clear that low gravity would be much different.
As much as usgov would love another reason to clutch pearls and shriek about China, we simply don't have the industry or resources to compete without a federal investment so massive that we wouldn't have any tax money left to give to the already ludicrously wealthy. And we can't have that.
But really american industry has been so thoroughly gutted that we can't compete anymore. Everyone else builds everything better and cheaper than we can. If there's a new space race to be had, we've already lost.
But none of those are going to happen. I mean SpaceX was delayed to do an environmental impact statement to check whether their rockets would land on whales in the gulf of mexico. Nobody's serious.
I think this is still a negative for the US though. China’s competitiveness means the Dollar and the US economy aren’t going to be dominant for long, or at least they’ll need to share their position with China. And US influence on the world order has been destroyed in the last year. If all of this continues - China’s progress, the slow erosion of American dominance, etc - then I think America will have to confront serious problems, like how it will deal with debt.
Did it? We're talking 1949 up to a few years ago. 70 odd years from mass starvation to having their own space station. One could even say it's less than that, starting with the reforms in the 80s.
[1] https://petapixel.com/2025/09/26/incredible-photos-show-the-...
Hard choices lie ahead.
If you pick a random person off the street and ask them who discovered the Americas will they answer 1. Leif Erikson, 2. Indigenous peoples or 3. Christopher Columbus? If you ask people who invented the smartphone will they say Apple or some other company?
It’s absolutely possible to lose a race you had previously won.
Soviets achieved:
- First artificial Orbit ( Sputnik )
- First animal to orbit ( Laika )
- First Man to orbit ( Yuri Gagarin )
- First Woman to orbit (Valentina Tereshkova )
- First EVA ( Alexei Leonov )
- First moon landing ( Luna 9 )
- First landing on another planet ( Venera 8 )
The Americans were at one point beat so bad that they invented their own game that only they were playing.
Yes, that spurred their entire economy and the boosted scientific investment paved the way for the decades of dominance since, and that should be rightly celebrated, but the idea that the USA "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
> "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
"Won the space race" because they were first at the very beginning is a nonsense too. Following this logic, China won rocket race because they invented first rockets centuries ago.
I remember picking through an aerospace scrapyard in North Hollywood a decade ago with extremely-talented launch engineers (and entrepreneurs). The aim was to look at parts, measure them and figure out why they were built like they were. We looked, a little, at stuff like nozzles. But mostly we focussed on bolts, joiners, turbine blades and the like.
Down to the fact that the Eastern Roman Empire was going strong.
Even in 2014, when I was in North Hollywood, SpaceX was carrying the torch.
Why would not having reusable rockets price someone like China or ESA out of orbit access?
I can see how it could price them out of the business of selling orbit access to other parties, but I don't see how it would stop them from accessing orbit for their own purposes.
European satellites can and do regularly launch on SpaceX though.
For now, that is. Until someone from Europe says something mean about the Bully in Chief, or threatens to side with the victim of an aggressive war… The EU can’t trust the USA anymore, so it’s high time to invest in sovereign orbit access.
But space flight is a strategic competency for states so China, the EU, and even eventually Russia, will all develop reusable rockets. I suspect that launch capacity will far exceed demand and that none will make profits for a long time.
(Not sure why this lesson in economics got a downvote?)
This reeks of AI slop. Plenty of “it’s not just X, its Y” in there too.