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Shop NowDon’t be fooled, China’s planned “magnetic levitation facility” on the moon is a weapon. It may look like a “green” way to “fling resources back to Earth in hopes of fixing the planet’s energy crisis” but that’s just a disguise. New York Post says the “$18 billion magnetic space device” is “straight out of a sci-fi movie.” Not quite. It comes from a book. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress written by Robert A. Heinlein and published in 1966. “As it says in Bible, God fights on side of heaviest artillery.” Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering has designed some seriously heavy artillery and hope to make it appear helpful and harmless.
A weapon in disguise
A story broke in South China Morning Post on Sunday, August 18, that describes the weapon in detail. They do that without saying a word about the clandestine military nature of the device.
Called “a magnetic levitation facility by researchers at Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering,” it’s advertised to “work like an Olympic hammer thrower by spinning before launching space material toward Earth.” Comparing the actual modern technology being used with the version predicted half a century ago show they’re chillingly similar.
Communist Chinese scientists “proposed a magnetic launcher as a low-cost way to get lunar resources back to Earth.” They don’t mention the fact that it could also be used as a powerful weapon.
🌙 Chinese Scientists Planning Rotating Launch System on the Moon 🇨🇳🚀
🌟 Chinese scientists have proposed building a magnetic launcher on the moon to provide a cost-effective way of sending resources extracted from the lunar surface back to Earth.
🔄 The magnetic levitation… pic.twitter.com/2e3HMVwCQp— Guptchar Society (@GuptcharSociety) August 18, 2024
“The plan could be linked to China’s joint space venture with Russia, in which the two countries proposed a research station to be built on the lunar south pole by 2035.” They plan to throw things down. Nothing is stopping them from throwing rocks instead of helium.
“The system’s technical readiness is relatively high,” the researchers said. They said it in the respectable journal Aerospace Shanghai. They can do it, as soon as the gear can get a ride to the moon. It will be expensive, they admit. “The launcher will cost a whopping 130 billion yuan.” That works out to around $18.2 billion. They get a whole lot of bang for their buck.
Instead of telling the world it can be used as a weapon, they promise it will “primarily” be used “to extract helium-3, an isotope present on the lunar surface, in hopes of fixing Earth’s energy crisis.” That means they know there are other things it can do. Like throw rocks.
Overthrow the Authority
Bob Heinlein was a true “visionary.” He’s credited with inventing the water bed and he described OnStar in the same book. He nailed a description of the word processor in another novel.
In this one, he combined libertarian politics with hard core physics and addressed the ethics of artificial intelligence in a serious and accurate way. At a time when the few computers in existence filled entire rooms and required teams of techs to swarm around changing vacuum tubes as they burned out. He described the maglev catapult weapon in such detail, all the Chinese had to do was build one.
“Mike” is an AI who runs everything from the phones to the maglev catapult the moon colony uses to ship things to Earth. “Force” a leader of the revolution declares, “is action of one body on another applied by means of energy.” Luna didn’t have “weapons” per se, but “when Mike examined them as class, they turned out to be engines for manipulating energy–and energy Luna has plenty.” That’s not the interesting part.
“Luna also has energy of position; she sits at top of gravity well eleven kilometers per second deep and kept from falling in by curb only two and a half km/s high. Mike knew that curb; daily he tossed grain freighters over it, let them slide downhill to Terra.” It can be a weapon, too.
“Mike had computed what would happen if a freighter grossing 100 tonnes (or same mass of rock) falls to Terra, unbraked. Kinetic energy as it hits is 6 .25 x 10^12 joules–over six trillion joules. This converts in split second to heat. Explosion, big one!” It should have been obvious, the AI declared. Just look at the moon.
“What you see? Thousands on thousands of craters–places where Somebody got playful throwing rocks.” It’s not a weapon, China insists. “Using the moon’s high vacuum and low gravity, it will launch payloads twice daily at roughly 10% of current transport costs.” Oh, by the way, Helium sounds like it’s light but they’ll compress it and those cylinders will weigh a ton.
