The second moon race is in full swing, with the world's two big superpowers angling to score a new set of firsts on the lunar surface. NASA's Artemis program recently clocked up its first success with the splashdown of Orion, but China is looking to take the lead when it comes to setting up a fully-fledged lunar research station. One of the first steps in that process—figuring out where to put it. That is what a new paper attempts to quantify, and it comes up with a practical solution—the south pole.

There are plenty of advantages to the lunar south pole. It also checks many of the boxes that the Chinese scientists were looking for when they developed their criteria for potential landing sites.

They broke those criteria into two categories—scientific and engineering constraints. Engineering constraints included considerations like the illumination a site receives, its general slope, and the ease with which explorers could access other parts of the moonscape.