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I work in a robotics research group. My natural bias is to always praise the robots. If the goal is just to have N robots/rovers on the moon for fun/data colle
by krasin 4y ago
I work in a robotics research group. My natural bias is to always praise the robots.
If the goal is just to have N robots/rovers on the moon for fun/data collection, then we don't need to send humans to space.
If the goal is to bootstrap a profitable space/Moon industrial complex, then we will need a lot of robots (some autonomous and some remote controlled from Earth) and a number of humans in the center of events. Humans are critical for keeping automation working and for adjusting to unforeseen circumstances.
- Aperocky 4y agoAgree fullheartedly If the goal is a profitable space industrial complex somewhere other than Earth, than humans probably need to be there, but that seems like way way ahead of what we're thinking of. We're not even close to bootstraping a cluster of autonomous robots on the moon, taking over the basic functions of base operations. Any humans at current stage is basically on sightseeing duty.
- krasin 4y ago> We're not even close to bootstraping a cluster of autonomous robots on the moon, taking over the basic functions of base operations. Any humans at current stage is basically on sightseeing duty. That's not really fair to say that people are there just to observe. For instance, Apollo folks took a lot more of geological samples that Lunokhods did and from a larger variety of places. The difference in mass was about 1000x (almost a ton vs almost a kg), geographical coverage was about 1000x and getting to different features was immensely easier for humans. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample-return_mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample-return_mission