this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Hahaha y'all been saying that for a decade already don't you get bored?
China is dying too silly. Their housing bubble is a nightmare, their currency is not desirable and all their factory jobs are going overseas.
Shit on China all you want. I know I do. The truth is though the CCP's already sending tons of rovers to the moon to find prime real estate and are heavily investing in reusable rockets like SpaceX. The US is gonna be humiliated when the next humans to return to the moon are Chinese nationals. Can we beat them before that happens? Yes, but we're making all the wrong moves both through government policy and many private space endeavors. Musk's already said he's more interested in Mars for example. The Artemis project keeps suffering severe setbacks due to it being driven by politicians and not NASA.
I disagree. Completely.
Large scale mining on another celestial body is similar to AI. It's not actually gonna happen in our lifetime we're not as close as we wanna believe.
We are those people in the 1800s who think everyone would have jet cars and shit by the year 2000. Nobody is that close. Likely they'll blow each other up and start fighting in space before anyone gets to mine.
We could do space mining today if their was any incentive to do it. There just isn't any reason to currently but if we start using fusion power (which China has made strides in recently) it would make a ton of sense to get He-3 on the moon.
Hell I give it 20 years before a private company at the very least tries to move one of the really rare earth element rich asteoids into an orbit around earth. From the calculations I've seen we could technically do it with current rocket tech assuming proper planet alignment.
No we cannot you vastly over estimate the cost of bringing things in and out of orbit. Especially at the load it would need to be a financial incentive to create the infrastructure to do so regularly.
I'd bet my balls we won't mine shit in space for the rest of the 21st century