Today in a discussion about protectionism, nationalism, and energy resources, someone brought up ‘China’s plan to harvest moon-dust.’ Nerdmode kicked into overtime – China builds up the PLAN-SF (People’s Liberation Army Navy – Space Force) and sets up a moon base to harvest the valuable extraterrestrial resource. Orbital fire fights ensue to comply with the Stackford Accords, which outlaws any open violence on the homeworld. War moves to space. Too good to be true?

Probably, but this is interesting: ‘China goes to the Moon for Helium 3 by 2024′ (BBC, Jun 2006).

Even so, this is perhaps a good time to broach this interesting Wired article about how China will not win the war in space – assuming it happens in the next few years:

… “war-gaming” a massive Chinese attack on US satellites, where China is only limited by the laws of physics and the known properties of their ASAT, and see how much damage could be done. Such an exercise also reveals what the US could do, and what it could not do, to minimize the consequences. The results of my calculations are reported here. They assume that China launches a massive attack and that everything works exactly as planned: every ASAT launches, the US does not respond until after the attacks are launched even though it will have overwhelming evidence ahead of time, and every ASAT hits its target. Thus, this is a worst case scenario for the United States. In the end, we’ll show, the US would still has sufficient space assets to fight a major conventional war with China, even after such an attack.

Bew bew… Bew… Pow bam. Normal posting will resume henceforth.