As a long suffering ham radio in space enthusiast, I concluded long ago that hams in North America are likely never going to have a satellite in GEO and probably not even another asset at HEO during the remainder of my lifetime. The modern launch business has made such things more difficult and the number of hams willing to invest in such an endeavor is incredibly small. After all, we don’t have an oil-rich benefactor that was responsible for the Es’hail-2 satellite that carries the highly enviable QO-100 payload available to a large chunk of the earth’s population, (just not here), to help us out.

Having abandoned hope of ever having a similar situation for those of us over “here”, I moved on to our next best hope: the Moon.

I hoped that as American’s went back to the lunar surface they would take ham radio along for the ride. I imagined a two or three meter dish on the ground here using SDR’s and microwaves to chat with those lunatics who would be living and working on the Moon for months at a time. And as they longed for human contact with someone back home, I really thought ham radio would play some role in that contact. After all, amateur radio has accompanied human explorers for a hundred years, even into space with the shuttle and the space stations.

But that was all predicated on the planned schedule where the United States would, by this point in the program, be assembling a sustainable base near the Aitken basin at the lunar south pole, or some equally desolate location.

NASA’s Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon was the plan. It’s already horribly behind schedule. And now Congress has substantially cut the NASA budget which makes me believe they will sunset this project and forget about the Moon. Talk of returning to that cold surface is just another political lie spoken to get elected. Once in office, these plans are discarded like so much regolith. We haven’t been back to the Moon in fifty years and it will be fifty more before we set foot there again.

Now if I was betting money, I’d take China to be the first to the Moon in the 21st century. Whether or not the global amateur radio community has any “buddies” in the Chinese space program, we need to make some. China has the determination to pull this off and they will do it while the US continues it’s rapid decline into shithole country status where we can no longer afford to even run our National Parks, let alone colonize the Moon.