Over the last few years many examples from Chinese industry and economic development, especially in the form of roads, railways, bridges, and airports, have been used to show how they are a rising 21st century power while America rots and decays.

But in the last couple of weeks there have been a couple of events that paint a more accurate picture of 21st century national powers in comparison to 20th century super-powers.

The first of these events was when Russia’s lunar lander Luna-25, aiming to land at the Moon’s South Pole, instead crashed. Russia’s forebear the USSR had quite a few successful robotic landings on the Moon over the decades and a few misses and crashes, like all space-fairing nations. But in combination with their military’s less-than-steller efforts in the Ukraine, this crash looked worse than normal, especially for what happened two days later:

On Wednesday, India became only the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon when its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft touched down near the South Pole of the moon — the first landing in the South Polar region in history.

In fact no other nation has succeeded in landing at the Moon’s South Pole so it’s a very big feather in India’s cap. Landing there is tough because of the orbital paths needed and the large number of craters and gullies at the landing zone. The location also has lot less direct sunlight and all Lunar robots have been solar-powered to date so that’s another tricky aspect. Finally, that lack of sunlight means its average temperatures are colder, some 230 degrees below zero, for longer. All up it’s a challenge for any robot lander to survive even after the landing, and only time will tell if the Indians have nailed that problem as well.

However, that cold is also the reason why the Lunar South Pole has become such a target for the USA, China, Russia and India. Cold means that ice deposited eons ago by comets crashing on the surface, may have survived, contrary to the reports from Apollo fifty years ago, which showed rocks that were “anhydrous”, lacking any sign of even a single water molecule. It took decades and a few orbital spacecraft returning to the Moon in the 1990’s and 2000’s to discover that ice might exist in permanently shadowed craters, like at the South Pole:

If you have water, you have H2O, you can certainly sustain life, obviously. But you can also create electrical energy, and H and O are actually rocket fuel. So you could conceivably fuel up rockets to go back to Earth, or perhaps even go farther beyond. So, with all that in mind, people who want to explore space find this an intriguing spot as a launching pad, if you will.

One of the most extraordinary things about the mission is probably going to be ignored: they did it for just $25 million. Even in the everyday world, let alone the world of aerospace and space exploration, that’s nothing. Maybe NZ has a shot at this too? Hello Rocket Lab?