Chief Advisor to the Moon Landing Program

Hua Nation urgently needed energy, but the same could not be said of spaceflight.

Even though the success of the Controlled Fusion Project saved the nation far more than two trillion a year in energy costs, that money could not simply be poured into space projects.

Where each sum went and what it would accomplish had to be decided through a rigorous process.

Especially now that rocket recovery technology had been worked out, launch costs were no longer what they once were.

Taking satellite launches into Low Earth Orbit as an example, international quotes put Space-X's Falcon Rocket at just 1,141 US dollars per kilogram. Compared with the per-kilogram cost in US dollars of the Delta IV Rocket designed by NASA in the 1990s, that represented a nearly tenfold reduction.

Meanwhile, the launch cost of Hua Nation's most internationally competitive commercial rocket, the Kuaizhou-1A Rocket, had also fallen from ten thousand US dollars per kilogram to around five thousand.

If a crewed moon landing required first delivering a spacecraft weighing roughly fifty tons into Low Earth Orbit, then, ignoring the practical fact that a spacecraft was not a satellite and could not be sent up in a dozen separate launches, that portion of the launch cost could theoretically be kept below 250 million US dollars.

Thus, if the goal was simply to get there, there was no need to build a mass driver.

But Lu Zhou had more in mind than merely sending people up to plant a flag. He wanted to establish a semipermanent, or even permanent, scientific research station on the Moon—and perhaps even a resource extraction base.

With that long-term goal in mind, there was considerable reason to adopt a theoretically cheaper launch method to deliver mass from the surface into Low Earth Orbit, beyond the atmosphere.