It all starts with a curiosity; Space mining.

Lunar mining will be profitable when the manufacturing of substances is developed in space, in a weightless or microgravity environment, substances that can be medicines, and the international space station and China are actually sophisticated laboratories where new substances, new materials are being developed in those special conditions, conditions of microgravity and vacuum and also radiation, combining a series of factors and thanks to these experiments we know that there are certain substances, certain medicines that can only be produced there or that can only be produced there in space with a extraordinary degree of purity, something we cannot achieve on Earth.

To supply materials to these factories of the future, resources will have to be taken from the Moon and then lunar mining and establishing a base on the Moon will be interesting, but in the meantime, having a ship orbiting the Moon, for example, to keep the research alive, sending a landing probe from time to time for a sample of a certain terrain because we see that a certain area or certain crater may be interesting, that was enough, it would not be necessary to send astronauts, perhaps when China does it, then yes, to keep the pulse but this whole shebang of a base orbiting the moon that is going to have to be shielded because solar radiation and cosmic radiation do not hit it completely there.

A base on the moon without an economic vision to support it, well, I don't know, Mars would be an option because no one has reached Mars, it would be a historical fact, they already did the other thing in the late 60s, we would have to question the role of NASA as a source of executing public contracts, as this also happens in the European Space Agency.