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Re:There’s No Planet B by adrianN on Monday January 16, 2023 @09:48AM (#34401157)
I think autonomy will take longer. We have pretty incredible manufacturing technology but it all requires long supply chains. Think about how difficult it is to make for example a lubed ball bearing and how many different specialties are needed to make it and maintain the infrastructure needed to make it. Replicating that on a different planet will take time.
Re:There’s No Planet B by __MatrixMan__ on Monday January 16, 2023 @11:16AM (#34402104)
I don't disagree about it taking longer, but wrangling our supply chain complexity problem is something that many are motivated to do here on Earth, so it's convenient that much of the work will get done independently of the colonization effort.

I hope we'll converge on manufacturing infrastructure that depends on a somewhat constrained set of inputs. Not because we're designing for Mars, but because that's just good fault-tolerant design.

Like maybe the plans call for steel but al that we have on hand is brass, and it's ok if this one is weaker, so we'll print it in brass: improvising to avoid logistic complexity.

Turns out, that's what you'd need for mars too. You can't be ordering part numbers manufactured on earth all the time. Wherever possible you're probably better off just importing tungsten (or whatever) and machining it local.

I think this sort of periodic-table-of-manufacturing approach would also be necessary to make recycling work. Whatever we call recycling today, it's nothing compared to what we'll need on Mars.