China makes historic landing on far side of the moon

reuters.com

24 points·tithe··9 comments

Open articleView on HN

> hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases.

Excuse my ignorance, but what minerals are of value on the moon?

EDIT: Wikipedia provides! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_resources

"Sustain". I guess extracting oxygen from minerals etc?

And here we are scrubbing starliner again :/

True, but in this case (equipment / structural issues), it's better to be safe than sorry.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1#Accident

> here we are scrubbing starliner again

Starliner isn’t in America’s moon program, Artemis.

SLS, Dragon, Orion and Starship are the relevant projects, and they’re progressing, if not at an ideal clip.

I didn't actually realized that.

I read that it's intended to get people to the ISS... which is not long for this world. I suppose it was begun well before it was clear that we'd be dismantling the ISS, but still...

Maybe there will be a new space station at some point.

> ...from the dark lunar hemisphere.

Argh! Every time! Pink Floyd has a lot to answer for.

It's not Obscured by Clouds either.

At least it'd be accurate for a Venus mission!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com