“All armies prefer high ground to low and sunny places to dark.”
– Sun Tzu, 544 -496 B.C.

The cost of the Apollo program which safely placed and returned the first men to the moon cost the citizens the United States $25.4 billion 1969 dollars ($161.64 billion dollars in 2013 metrics) of research and development.  It is unfortunate that the return on taxpayer investment will not benefit the American people.

Decades of United States politicians who were – and are – either technologically illiterate, lacking in any true vision of a better future, or flat-out corrupt, are responsible for this latest example of the ongoing involuntary American Taxpayer support of Chinese space program (2011).

As of the writing of this post, the current thinking in Washington is that NASA should not be looking to develop bases on the moon.  The thought is that enterprises of lunar and near space exploitation will be successfully undertaken by private industry.   While this may be true, the unforseen exception will be  that the heralded private industry will be China in the form of the Chinese government.