Re:Texas astronomers revive idea for 'Ultimately Large Teles...
by kevin_thibedeau on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @10:51AM
(#25125147)
Robotics in hard vacuum with abrasive soil, extreme temperature fluctuations, and bullets raining down. We don't deal with that on Earth.
Re:Texas astronomers revive idea for 'Ultimately Large Teles...
by inglor_cz on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @12:44PM
(#25126810)
Except for abrasive soil, all the challenges exist on the orbit as well. And various satellites seem to cope.
If attrition of the robots turns out to be a factor, it could still be solved like this: expect that an average robot can survive 6 months on the lunar surface. So send twenty of them to the remote base, build a cave for the reserve robots and "burn" through the reserve slowly. Every 4-5 years, send a human crew to replace or repair the dead robots.
Can be done, the main question is the price tag.
Latency between Earth and the Moon is just enough to make realtime command a bit too rough to use I'd imagine, so I imagine we'd need at least low level autonomous tasks of "move resources from landing pad to storage" and "prepare build site" with enough intelligence to detect when these tasks hit an exception.
On top of that, I suspect we'd need enough robotic automation to be able to build, maintain and run whatever the thing is. That probably means several specialized robots (packing dirt for a foundation, deploying construction pieces, a crane) as well as some general robots for when things do go off script (haul away a broken robot, right a fallen pylon, remove debris).
Does this feel like something achievable in the next decade or two? Are there large pieces we're missing?