China will build a Super-Weapon on the Moon! Can NASA stop them?

good afternoon on today's angry bulletin back in 2020 I speculated as to what China intended to do with a very large scale nuclear reactor that they were planning to build for their lunar base a reactor with 10 times the power of the reactor that NASA intends to use and just recently while all of us were focused on Starliner in the American presidential election China and announced that they intend to build an electromagnetic Mass driver on the moon ostensibly for peaceful purposes but something that could definitely be used for military purposes as well military purposes that includes the capability to deliver nuclearized strikes to any point on the earth that they wish strikes that would be virtually impossible to stop all of this and more coming at you on the angry astronaut right [Music] now good afternoon and once again welcome to the angry astronaut back in October of 2020 I talked extensively about what a war on the moon might actually look like although interestingly enough if you try a Google search for that particular topic you'll never actually find it you have to go directly to my channel in order to be able to do a search for it which is very strange and I also noticed that not a whole lot of people clicked on the video at the time that I released it you'd almost think that YouTube doesn't like those particular types of topics but in any event it's a little frightening especially given the recent press release from the Shanghai Institute of satellite engineering and this actually came out in the South China morning post but it was reprinted in interesting engineering so the idea and by the way what you're looking at right now is the spin launch design which was actually intended to try to launch rockets off of Earth utilizing an electromagnetic hammer throw technique but on the moon this would be much much more useful in any event this same type of system as I said based on the hammer throw principle is is also being proposed by the Chinese for a costeffective resource transport to Earth or so they say leveraging the moon's High vacuum and low gravity it would eject payloads twice daily at about 10% the current transport cost according to the researchers the researchers explain that the system's technical Readiness is relatively High since it only requires electricity and no propellant it will be compact and simple to implement and this is according to a paper that they wrote in a journal called Aerospace Shanghai they highlighted that the primary goal is to extract and return helium 3 in order to help solve Earth's energy crisis in the struggle to produce practical Fusion now here's conventional Fusion for those of you unfamiliar with why helium 3 is important this combines durium and tridium resulting in a helium atom and neutron radiation quite a lot of neutron radiation from this type of fusion yes it produces a great deal of energy but also you need a lot of radiation shielding in order to make it relatively safe but if you have helium 3 combined with dyum the result is a normal helium atom and a normal hydrogen nucleus this is a far cleaner and far easier to achieve fusion reaction however there isn't much helium 3 on the planet very little in fact and so the idea is to try to get it from the moon because there's a hell of a lot of it there now according to the paper just 20 tons of helium 3 could meet China's entire yearly electricity demand and while Earth only has around half a ton total of helium 3 the lunar soil is estimated to contain 1 million tons enough to power the entire planet's energy needs for over a thousand years the paper however didn't really specify as to how the helium would be extracted rather this is all about how to return it to Earth the proposed launch system would use a 50 m or 165 ft rotating arm in a high temperature superconducting motor to launch capsules filled with lunar resources and as you can see this design as I said before for spin launch is Loc ated here on Earth but the principle is essentially the same after about 10 minutes the rotating arm reaches the moon's escape velocity of 2.4 km/s about 1 16 of Earth's escape velocity to set the capsule on the correct trajectory for its return to Earth the system will use solar and nuclear energy once again a very good application for the 1 megawatt nuclear reactor that China is planning to put on the moon 10 times the power of NASA's kilowatt nuclear reactor that they're proposing with only over 70% rather of energy recovered after each launch by converting kinetic energy back to electricity during deceleration the aim is to precisely calculate the launch angle within .1 de to reduce the need for adjustments on the way back to Earth designed to last at least 20 years the system will weigh about 80 metric tons and will require China's super heavy lift rocket their star ship clone to transport it to the moon now the team behind the project suggested that could it be could be part of a proposed Russian Chinese joint effort to establish a research station at the lunar South Pole by 2035 the launch station will cost approximately $ 18.2 billion to build or so they say however if China could mine 3 to 5 tons of helium 3 annually and return it to Earth that would generate revenues of around 15 billion dollar a year meaning that this project would pay for itself in as little as 14 months so it all sounds pretty impressive pretty exciting and pretty peaceful what's the problem here well the problem is this very same system can also be used for military purposes very very very dangerous military purposes and something that's been explored since the 1960s the project was called rods from God and the idea was to launch tungsten projectiles just long telephone pole sized projectiles from orbit and to use them for Bunker busting capabilities capable of delivering tactical Nuclear siiz blasts with a great deal of penetr trading power now there's been lots of complications that have come up with this type of system not least of which is how do you get it through the atmosphere without the projectile completely burning up or turning into a less damaging blob of superheated plasma however there are heat shields including inflatable heat shields that we've been experimenting with recently that might be able to minimize the damage to the projectile here's the deal if you can actually deliver a projectile at this type of speed the speed that is required to get a projectile from the Moon to Earth about 11 km/s the amount of damage that this projectile delivers when it finally reaches the surface of the Earth is utterly colossal if you were to take just spin launches basic design which can launch as much as 400 kg worth of pap load into orbit and translate that to a lunar system that would be over 2 metric tons worth of projectile heading towards Earth and if that projectile were to survive all the way to the moment of impact it would create a tactical nuclear siiz explosion of several kilotons now the reason that our planet is not constantly peppered with tactical Nuclear blasts all the time is because most of these projectiles burn up up in the upper atmosphere where they do no harm something that weighs a couple of metric tons would burn up at approximately 49.6 km altitude where it would do no harm but a hyperdense projectile designed to survive atmospheric entry would do the same kind of damage that meteoroids do when they strike the surface of the Moon pretty significant even for small meteoroids so why is this system so dangerous and why does the Moon make it especially dangerous I mean why not just launch these projectiles from orbit well number one from the Moon you cannot be observed at least from Earth you can strike at Earthbound targets with impunity if you are located somewhere concealed in other words inside Shackleton crater for example from that location you could launch projectile after project at the Earth with extreme Precision perhaps you could put small maneuvering thrusters on the projectile to execute minor course corrections but for the most part you wouldn't need any propulsion system whatsoever just the force of the electromagnetic hammer throw would be enough to escape the moon's gravity and Plum it towards the Earth at horrifying speeds again without a propulsion system meaning that you have no heat signature on this projectile it would be very very difficult to detect something this small moving this fast and you would have no idea that it was on its way because the point of launch would be completely out of sight an adversary equipped with this weapon would essentially be able to deliver a Hypersonic stealth attack and to give you an idea of how terrifying and fast these kinds of project Iles can travel this is footage of an alleged Hypersonic kinsall missile and keep in mind this isn't going anywhere near as fast as a projectile launch from the Moon would travel you and if you scale up the size of the projectiles essentially start launching artificial meteors at Targets on the planet well then Kil aons turn into megatons without all that pesky radiation and again you're doing this without any heat signatures without any indication that an attack is on the way as opposed to thermonuclear missiles that are launched today where satellites can observe their heat signatures the moment they lift off even if they're being launched from a submarine you would not have that kind of luxury with this type of weapon and also trying to knock it out would be extremely difficult because of What's called the gravity well advantage or up the gravity well as it is sometimes called keep in mind that nobody has an ICBM or any other type of missile that's capable of reaching the moon the only type of rockets that are capable of delivering a substantial explosive payload to the moon are orbital class Rockets like falcon Falcon heavy Atlas 5 that sort of thing rockets that you have to spend a lot of time prepping rockets that are definitely going to advertise the fact that they're on the way and Rockets that would be fairly easy to knock out of the sky even from the Moon as a matter of fact especially from the Moon a Chinese Moonbase would have days to prepare for this type of strike and in that time they could launch projectile after projectile easily overcoming the moon's gravity to try to knock the rocket down it's just a simple matter of Newtonian physics to eventually get the calculations right because the missile really wouldn't be carrying out a whole lot in the way of evasive action or anything like that especially if you consider that the projectiles the Chinese would be launching would be stealth projectiles no propulsion system no heat signature it would be impossible to tell when the interception rocket was even coming with radar yes you could but you would only get a last second opportunity to evade the projectile any moon base would have a huge advantage against potential attackers now to be clear and to be fair China could definitely use this system purely for economic reasons as well and they would probably make an enormous profit off of doing it you could launch all sorts of rare metals and rare Earths lots of valuable things for the Moon besides helium 3 and you could do it very very inexpensively with this type of system intercepting the payload perhaps in low earth orbit and bringing it back that way this has the potential to definitely revolutionize the future of lunar Mining and to build a space-based economy but at the same time given the fact that the Chinese National space agency is a branch of their military I cannot imagine that they aren't looking at the obvious military applications for this type of system and if we don't want to be at a tremendous strategic disadvantage in future conflicts we absolutely need to make sure that we are at the lunar South Pole as well that we are monitoring everything that China does at their new base in Shackleton crater and the best way to make sure that the moon does not become the battleground of the future is to make sure that the Chinese know that if they attempt to use it for any sort of military purposes we will be ready to deny them any advantage they might hope to gain thank you very much for watching please don't forget to like And subscribe and I would also like to thank through traffic for becoming my latest patreon supporter really really appreciate all your help as we continue to try to climb that hill to 1% of my subscribers becoming patreon supporters I hope you enjoy my new exclusive content coming out actually in a few hours from now and this one is also about the moon a lunar space elevator and if you'd like to check that content out all the details are in the description and as always stay angry about space [Music]