Re: Politics of the Issue.
I do not wish the Chinese program ill and applaud their success.
My comments about 2nd and last man were not meant as nationalism, but rather to indicate their expertise with lunar landers. These men knew the Apollo LEM as well as any person and thus are qualified to assess the capability of a lunar lander design, even if just from photos.
There's been a lot of talk about whether or not the Moon can be mined for minerals. It's apparently made out of exactly the same stuff Earth is, more or less (indeed, the leading theory is that it was separated from the planet during a collision during the planetary formation period), so who knows what's in it or whether it would ever be economically feasible to do.
My understanding is that the moon is a pretty terrible place for mining any solid substance or element for Earth usage; you're better off looking at asteroids. Helium-3, on the other hand, might just be economically feasible for mining... IF we ever find a good use for it. Right now it simply isn't necessary (let alone economic) to land a processing and refinement facility of the scale Helium-3 production would demand.
Space is generally a terrible place to mine most substances for
Terrestrial usage. An argument can be made for Platinum group metals, but only as the costs (environmental, physical, political, etc) become even greater.
The tons of Lunar regolith required for a gram of Helium-3 makes it also essentially a non-starter, even if fusion radioactive byproducts are a challenge to deal with. Go mine the upper atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn.
In the 1970s, the L5 Society and now the National Space Society argue to use Lunar resources to be the primary source to construct space colonies around EML-5. This involves a relatively small, lightly manned lunar outpost doing resource extraction and then throwing it via mass drivers out to the general vicinity of EML-5.
The "business-case" for such colonies was/is production of Space-Based Solar Power plants to provide power to Earth. These would be massive satellites in Geosynchronous orbit beaming (broadcasting) their power down to ground collection antennas. In theory, this would shift power production off world except for the antennas and all the benefits that may have.
In general, the biggest challenge for space development for the past 30 years has been the business-case. What do you sell back to the Earth to pay for the cost of getting there?
Right now, I think the objective in the spaceflight community is to get the costs down so that exiting and re-entering orbit doesn't cost a billion dollars a launch and that spaceflight becomes a little more commonplace.
Not even a Delta IV Heavy actually costs $1B to launch at the moment (assuming ULA is launching other vehicles that year).
SpaceX currently has the Falcon 9 (~13 tonnes to LEO) priced at $56.5M (<$4,350/kg) and the Falcon Heavy (~53 tonnes to LEO) priced at $135M (<$2550/kg). These are roughly 1/2 and 1/4 the
traditional estimate of $10,000/kg!
In addition, the cost to send 2 people to space for 2 months (60 days) on a SpaceX DragonRider to a
Bigelow Space Station can be estimated at <$80M (almost as cheap as a
single seat on a
Soyuz to ISS).
This is all a really long way of saying prices are coming down. As flight rate goes up, prices will come down more.