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>What do you think is going to happen to their base if a flying power drill makes a hole in it?br> They'll spend maybe five minutes patching the hole with fiberglass tape and epoxy.
The drills I know, explode when they see tape or epoxy. So I repeat, such a station is indefensible without lots of good equipment. Let the Chinese spend themselves into bankruptcy - like the USSR did.

If you think posting pretty pictures on the internet is a reasonable job. I don't.
If you don't think that's enough, I invite you to do better.

If people don't go, then it's not worth even having a space program.
People will go when the time is right. I repeat, in space, machines can do much more than people: chem analysis - no problem, digging - no problem, bring back samples - no problem, pretty pictures - O YEAH!

That said, I'd prefer that the private sector have much bigger involvement this time around
Private industry is always involved. Show them the money and say what you want - that's about it. The problem is, we wanted too many things without practical value.

> The drills I know, explode when they see tape or epoxy.

You know some odd drills. But regardless: if you drill a hole into the side of a spacecraft of some type... it's a quite simple matter to patch the hole and move on with life. You've apparently watched *and believed* too much Sci-Fi, where a finger sized hole creates a huricane.

> If you don't think that's enough, I invite you to do better.

That's what's going to happen, with luck.

>People will go when the time is right.

The time was right twenty years ago.

>repeat, in space, machines can do much more than people:

They can't make babies and civilizations. That's all that's of any real importance.