onehundredmiles

It’s been 40 years since the Apollo missions and the first manned lunar landings and I, for one, have been watching the TV programmes quite a bit. It’s all the same old knowledge though, filled with things everyone already knew. The crew of Apollo 11 underestimating their position and having to land in precarious circumstances, the cancellations of the later Apollo missions due to lack of political will, the more recent US revival in space exploration by ‘Dubya’ and his directing NASA to get a man on Mars in the next few decades.

What I found more interesting was the missions planned by other nations. Particularly China.

OK, so many people know that China have a lunar exploration programme. Many people know that China plan to land men on the moon around 2020/30.
What I didn’t know was that following their manned missions, China will begin construction of a permanently occupied lunar base!

If this did happen, it would completely change space exploration. I’m thinking along the lines of 2001 here. Minus the evil computer.
Whoever decided to build an extremely powerful artificial intelligence and give it a BRIGHT RED EYE anyway?!

A lunar base would not only be exceedingly cool, but would offer a ‘recharge station’ for spacecraft going from Earth to more distant destinations, not needing anything like the huge rockets required to take a craft to the escape velocity of Earth. Taking off from the Moon would be a much easier task.

Hopefully once it’s all completed the Chinese will share their lunar base with the other nations, perhaps there’ll even be an Earth-wide space exploration programme and all of the political agendas involved in space exploration will be gone. Maybe I’m wishing there though.

None of this is fully OFFICIAL yet, but the renewed interest in space exploration is definately a good sign of things to come!

Further reading:

New York Times
Statesman.com