It’s 2041 and at the Artemis Base Camp on the rim of the Shackleton Crater, an American space mining engineer and his Japanese colleague are sipping coffee, scowling at the latest headline: Elsewhere in the Aitken Basin, the Chinese have found yet another rich deposit of Helium-3, not far from their International Lunar Research Station, the one they constructed with the Russians in 2036.
This hasn’t happened yet, but it’s not science fiction. It’s the genuine ambition of the United States and China — among others — to establish a permanent presence on the moon with the explicit mission of mining – and exploiting – lunar resources.
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