Um, ya, and so what if they do know? Should we give a flying flipper?
I'm missing the point, so who cares who gets to what when? I'm guessing there is some political conspiracy behind it. Why not let China go land on the moon? Why should we have to "race" them? Why should we care?

This is exactly the nonesense we DON'T need to spend money on. A muscle flexing my rockets are better then your rockets race.

There is not much a human can do on the moon that a well created robot can't do. Grab samples, take readings, send data back, etc... And would cost much less to do.

I never said anything like that. I think it was this Mark Kirk guy. :angel:

What? Stop reading children's books then. U.S. has walked on the moon and it has absolutely NO atmosphere and is a lot closer to the sun (the same distance we are). Mars actually does have an atmosphere, thin, but enough to screen out gamma rays, Xrays and some of the UVc band.

Ok back to the China thing. IMO China IS the greatest threat to Western society, this includes you Europeans. The US senate was appaulled with what they heard of the Chinese space program, don't make me laugh, that's just a drop in the bucket compared top what they've been spending on military build up. Yes build up. For what? Not only that they export military equipment/technology to every non U.S. friendly country that can afford it. Why? And so much so they are second only to N. Korea in arms exports world wide.

Their industrial development is growing so fast they are now #2 in oil imports worldwide (US is #1) and they are still just ramping up and are not even 1/3 the way to full development. When the full power of the Chinese economy is realized they can buy England, US, and Europe and have some change left over to explore Mars, Jupitiers and Saturn. That is of course unless U.S, Canada and Europe stop selling out our middle class jobs to China so we can afford cheap crap from Walmart. :dead: And even then OUR governments make no demands on the Chinese communist government (I hate communist or anything Marxist, it doesn't work and is too corruptable) such as: "We trade with you, you trade with us" and "Oh btw stop building so many f**** missles and warships! It does look very friendly".

One family to beam up.

technically the moon has an atmosphere - but it's negligiable. Mostly lunar ionized dust.

So there is a conspiracy then? What does the US "know", that we don't want anybody else to? And to what lengths would we go to keep others at bay? And how would us "racing" them back up into orbit, stop them from learning things anyway?

I wonder if I'm a conpiracy theorist? I hope not