3 ms·
Except he'd still be wrong if that was his point. There's an enormous body of work on even sophisticated industrial processes (reducing metals, producing oxygen
by Robotbeat 8y ago
Except he'd still be wrong if that was his point. There's an enormous body of work on even sophisticated industrial processes (reducing metals, producing oxygen from rock, producing glasses, producing high quality electronic materials, optical glasses of a quality not available on Earth, etc, etc) and how to do them in space. This is basically Dunning-Kruger in action, reinforced by the fact that most people on HN are also completely unaware of this large body of literature (but like the idea of being that intellectual skeptic). Seriously, give it a quick search: https://ntrs.nasa.gov https://ntrs.nasa.gov
- hutzlibu 8y agoSince I am a space enthusiast myself and I seriously want to work on a moon base in my life, I believe I know a bit, what is going on. And as I said, it is awesome. And I believe we basically have allmost all the needed technology to do industrial production in space. But we are not doing it yet, nobody has done it. Therefore we don't know if it will really work, or if there will be problems we have not thought about and did not show ul in the limited experiments done so far. So I believe it can be done and any problems be solved (and there will be many) - but postulating a robot-rocket building industry on the moon and actually building one, are two different things. Because there are many, many, many processes needed, to keep a complex factory running, so many supply lines. And even when you focus on building only the basic parts and import the complex ones, like computer chips from earth - still very hard and unproven. Because this is what people mean, when they talk about space industry. Not just extracting oxygen from rock.