The current US administration's plans were to send astronauts to Mars. That's now been dropped, and the emphasis will now be to compete with China and try to build a base before them. Who starts a lunar base first matters. Although the Outer Space Treaty prohibits anyone from claiming lunar territory, whoever sets up a base can claim some sort of rights to the site and its vicinity.
The best site will be somewhere on the south pole (this means almost continuous sunlight) with access to frozen water at the bottom of craters. It's possible that extensive lava tubes for radiation protection will be important, too. China's plans envision its base being built inside these. The number of places with easy access to water and lots of lava tubes may be very small, and some much better than others. Presumably whoever gets there first will get the best spot.
Who will get there first? It remains to be seen. The US's weakness is that it is relying on SpaceX's Starship to first achieve a huge number of technical goals, and so far, SpaceX is far behind schedule on those.
China's plans for a lunar base have made NASA change its plans by de-emphasising Mars & pivoting to try and build a Moon base before China.
byu/lughnasadh inFuturology
5 Comments
China isn’t interested in playing games like races
They are planning on a 50-100 year scale, I don’t think they actually care if the US wins by flogging engineers at the lowest bidding corporations to slap something together quickly
>The US’s weakness is that it is relying on SpaceX’s Starship to first achieve a huge number of technical goals,
The US would still be relying on Russia on getting their astronauts to and from the space shuttle without SpaceX. And without starship, humanity would still be 50+ years away from Mars.
>The current US administration’s plans were to send astronauts to Mars.
That wasn’t ever really a plan in development, though.
Artemis has been in progress for 8+ years. Plans for a moon base have been ongoing for that long.
In comparison, no one did any work specifically on a crewed mars mission.
These aren’t comparable “plans,” one was a statement one time and the other has been NASA’s actual goal for almost a decade with congressional funding.
Also I’m not sure the Mars comments in any way superseded planned Artemis moon landings anyway.
Space exploration definitely isn’t something thats good for sharp pivots and instability. I doubt this will work out.
Now China announces they were planning to build in Mars all along.