Rocket launch marks big step in building China’s lunar infrastructure

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If you want a realistic chance of supporting a lunar base, it seems to me that a launch per week might well be needed, at least early on. Bootstrapping a working economy from scratch will take an enormous amount of stuff. And people.

On Earth, the environment is so friendly that you can build an economy from literally nothing, you can just hang out in the trees and survive, but one on Luna will need so much equipment to be even minimally viable, and will teeter on the brink of extinction for years and years, if it survives at all. Survival requirements will need ridiculous amounts of redundancy to be safe, and all that redundant gear will take a ton of maintenance, which means even more stuff launched from Earth.

I think it's likely to take at least a decade of weekly launches, and very possibly a lot more or a lot longer, before any lunar colony becomes self-sufficient. The investment required will seem like lunacy.

edit: and it's very possible our entire safety regime will have to change. If a Starship is lost, there's a good chance they won't be able to stand down for six months or a year to figure out what went wrong and fix it. They may have to keep launching to keep the people on the Moon alive while they figure it out.
I agree with all of that about the need for weekly earth/Moon launches for a lunar colony(s) to thrive in the early decade(s).
However, I have a different view about the safety regime.
To me to promote safety, it is essential that there be multiple landing systems. From what I see now the serious contenders are SpaceX and Blue Origin. Both of their Moon landing systems need to be fully operational. Then if one is offline due to safety issues, then the other can continue with earth to lunar traffic.
 
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