The successful landing of the Yutu lunar rover enables China to explore the surface of the Moon and take the first steps toward successfully utilizing its material resources.

The next logical step will be to send prospecting robots, then mining robots, then the transportation infrastructure to send mined resources back to Earth. That last step is problematic, but it can be done robotically for much less than the cost of shipping payloads from Earth to Moon.

As I survey online comments to the articles on this accomplishment, one thought occurs to me: We can blame and finger-point, but unless we compete, we’re going to lose by default.