"Perhaps more significantly, low-energy pathways lead away from L1 and L2, which can be exploited to send spacecraft to Jupiter, Mars, asteroids, for less fuel. They make an excellent staging point," Belbruno said. "Placing spacecraft at these points gives one a high ground, so to speak." Not only would they be interesting places to position a space station, but from there China could perform planetary exploration, both in piloted and automated mode.
Not getting at you, but there's something profoundly disgusting about talking about "China" doing planetary exploration. Surely the word should be "Earth".
(Kinda curious what y'all find objectionable about this idea.)
I think your post comes across differently than you meant it. I think this is how it's going:
What you meant: "It's deeply unfortunate that we're at the point of venturing to other planets but we still haven't managed to get past all our petty divisions on this one."
How it reads: "I prefer to think of humanity as a unified whole and view national boundaries as pernicious fictions, and it bothers me when other people talk about these fictional boundaries in the context of something as important as space exploration. Please phrase it differently from now on."
The latter reading comes across as kind of pedantic and bossy, not to mention unrealistic.
Of course exploration should be done on behalf of all humankind.
My remark was a reflection about, but not agreement with, the notion that the resource motivated wars of exploitation a couple of centuries ago are possibly about to begin anew in Space.
It should be entirely possible to craft international treaties to preclude extraterrestrial resource conflict while maximizing the commercial opportunities that will benefit us - either as owners or as customers.
