China is awesome!

[FrostyBoy]

Everyone must start somewhere. China is doing very well. It is irrelevant and stupid to keep saying "It's been done before". China hasn't done it before and so it needs to take the same steps America did. Except now it can do so with better prepared data and better technology.

This is not laughable, this is serious; China may have a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean it can't do what America can (who btw, also has a crapload of serious problems). Do not underestimate China's potential.


Just curious, does anyone actually own territory on the moon yet? Does putting a flag there mean you get to keep it? Was it divided up? If China lands, puts a flag where America put their flag, then builds a moonbase there, has China effectively declared war on America?

[Alinestra Covelia]

The usual minimum requirement for declaring (Earthside) property is that you are physically present, and you make some improvement to the land.

The Americans were physically present and they planted a flag as well as some reflector lenses (these are large enough so that you can see them from Earth with a telescope when they catch the light).

But whether that counts as actual declaration of property, and whether that claims the whole Moon or just the surface area that the improvements are limited to, is uncertain.

There is a man who makes money by "selling" deeds to stretches of land on the Moon and the rest of the planets in the Solar System. This is largely unsupported by the law. He has not been physically present and has not met the minimus requirements of making some sort of improvement to these tracts of extraterrestrial land.

The fact that people still pay him money to "own" these bits of land that he himself has no rights to is somewhat confounding.