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Comment by snickerbockers | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty skeptical, as a general rule if something has never been done on earth before you're not going to do it in space. Not that I think this is impossible, but nobody even has autonomous mining and construction abilities on earth, and they're going to do that on the moon with an extremely limited ability to perform manual maintenance (I'm sure they have some sort of remote manually-operated drone in mind but again, nobody's ever even done that on earth and they're going to do it in space).

TFA also left out that it's not only going to be a PoC for autonomous mining and manufacturing, but also autonomous refining. When the Toyota corporation built my car they didn't start with unrefined steel ore. I don't even know how they're going to do that in a vacuum where there's no fires and no convection.

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> When the Toyota corporation built my car they didn't start with unrefined steel ore.

Well, actually, they did.[1] Toyota has their own steel mills. "Great cars are made with great steel".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aichi_Steel

I'm fairly sure it has not been done on earth because labor is simply cheaper, not because it's technologically impossible.

The point here I think is that we should try doing autonomous operations on Earth first not because they are cheaper - they are not - but because it's cheaper to try them on Earth than on the Moon. When we have these tests successful on Earth, we can send the systems to the Moon.

But I'm sure this is being done.

> But I'm sure this is being done.

By whom?

If you'd plan an operation on the Moon which was using robots to e.g. gather the ground, transport it to a melting plant and melt the materials, splitting it into gases and solid or liquid parts, wouldn't you first try to give those robots a test on Earth? Probably simulated rocks, maybe in a big vacuum chamber, but still? I would definitely consider that. And I think those who work on such projects are thinking about that as well.

> wouldn't you first try to give those robots a test on Earth?

The answer there is "yes, of course" but that's not an answer to the question I asked. The question I'd like to know the answer to is "who is doing this work, right now? "

> those who work on such projects...

Yes. Who is that, specifically, by name?

Robotic manipulation in unstructured environments still doesn't work well. It's embarrassing. Just picking items from bins at human speed or better still doesn't work in production. Amazon has spent much effort on this. This is what current technology looks like.[1] That's with machine learning.

In the early 1980s, some people at Stanford were talking about building something on the moon with robots by the year 2000. I asked "How soon can you do that in Utah?" They didn't like that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ix_nP2D3hQ

There's a lot of AI progress now though. Here are some deepmind football robots https://youtu.be/ET-MmoeSvXk?t=435

Robot soccer has been around for years. It's still not very good. Here's the current level of performance.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WppNmh6l3DM

Yeah but the point of the deepmind video is there is an advance. The robots in your video are kind of pathetic at it with humans needed to stop them falling over. The deepmind ones here (https://youtu.be/ET-MmoeSvXk?t=219 same vid different part) can keep playing even with someone pushing them over. It's kind of gone from geriatrics with carer level to small children playing level.

If progress continues at the rate it's been going recently they may get quite good.

Sounds like the 1980 NASA/ASEE Summer Study at the University of Santa Clara, with the proceedings edited by the prolific Robert Freitas: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19830007077/downloads/19...

Yes. Start at page 77: "NONTERRESTRIAL UTILIZATION OF MATERIALS: AUTOMATED SPACE MANUFACTURING FACILITY".

"The team surmises that within the next 50 years robot systems will be capable of handling a large fraction of the needs of a general-purpose SMF."

44 years later, not even close.

Google DeepMind robotics today.[1] Can put a shirt on a hanger, but not button or unbutton it.

[1] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/advances-in-robot-dext...

I know this is a tangent, but that was a painful video to watch. It's clear their product is the AI, and maybe a bit of special sauce in being able to hook it up to existing networks / backplanes / equipment. But half of that video was the interviewer asking questions about how the box runs Linux, and you could run any software you want in there.

It's rare to see an interviewer at a trade show like that have so little context about what they're looking at.

Earth seems a much hairier environment. Air means weather, water is notoriously corrosive, and random wildlife and microorganisms are hair squared. And initially nobody's going to care about preserving the wilderness. It is true we mostly don't have to worry about meteors and hard radiation, and the local temperature range is smaller.

There were some design studies of lunar resources and their extraction in the 70s, iirc using solar furnaces. I think I read about this in https://space.nss.org/colonies-in-space-by-t-a-heppenheimer/ almost that long ago.

The novelty and distance are a challenge but maybe less of one than the problems for autonomy on Earth?

Probably budgets are different as well. Why automate something you can do cheaper with operators? We may be able to automate things on earth but at a prohibitive price with respect to competitors. On the moon your competitors would have the same limitations —ie you’ll just have to pay up to get it to work.

> Earth seems a much hairier environment.

Absolutely not. In space you have to dela with things like radiation, extreme temperatures, or cold welding of joints. Energy supply can be a big issue depending on your environment. On the moon you have to deal with extremely abrasive dust.

The most critical issue in space is how difficult it is to fix things: If you can get a human there, they will be constrained by airlocks and space suits. In most cases it will be impossible to get anybody there and you need to construct 100% reliable or self-repairing machines. This is extremely difficult.

On Earth you need to compete against other people doing the same. So you design on the edge of performance to extract the last few percents of efficiency to compete on price against all the other people doing the same thing. Which means the machines are complicated, use rare materials and require a lot of maintenance.

On the Moon you can do the simplest thing that works and if it works at 10% efficiency and breaks after 1 year - so be it, if it's enough time to get resources to make a new one.

Basically space exploration will have a lot more in common with industrial revolution than with overengineered spacematerial NASA stuff.

If we have to make the tractors 10x bigger to have the same power and output, and to use disposable steel cables instead of hydraulics, and to make them disposable after 2 years instead of lubricating them to last 20 years - that's all fine if it means it can work with lunar materials only.

> On the Moon you can do the simplest thing that works and if it works at 10% efficiency and breaks after 1 year - so be it, if it's enough time to get resources to make a new one.

The opposite it true: You can throw away things on Earth and have local industry produce replacements. You cannot cost-effectively bring equipment to the moon since you have significant launch costs. Optimizing for light-weight and reliable machines is inherently costly. There is no escape from gravity here.

> That's all fine if it means it can work with lunar materials only.

There is no manufacturing capability on the moon and you need to price in the cost of setting up such an industry through the bottleneck of lauches.

Automation is especially challenged by richly varying or adversarial conditions. The moon has much less of both than the Earth; i.e. Earth is "hairier". I already agreed that the particular conditions include new problems; in fact I already listed your first two.

BTW spacesuits could probably be much better for repair work; they seem like another area where NASA has stagnated.

The moon has something Earth hasn’t and as far as I have seen it seems nobody has figured out how to handle it yet. Moon dust.

“The tiny, electrostatically charged particles made of crushed lunar rock clung to every surface, from spacesuits to electronics, and even infiltrated the astronauts’ lungs. Crews tried using a brush or their hands to sweep the sharp, abrasive dust off their spacesuits, but neither method proved very effective.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nasas-moon-dust-pr...

It's a WILD assumption that they won't prototype their setup "locally" in a most moon-like location they can find, before going to the dark side of the moon.

>> if something has never been done on earth before you're not going to do it in space.

Well, with the rate at which we are launching thousands of loud satellites, radio astronomy may simply have to move to space. Maybe not the moon, but we will need to get the telescopes somewhere above the satellite constellations if we want to continue doing radio astronomy.

Do we actually want to continue doing radio astronomy? I'm not sure we do.

Sure, some people would like it, but where is the money going to come from? Are governments really willing to spend the money needed to move radio astronomy into space or to the Moon? I seriously doubt it. I think it's pretty obvious that we (humanity) care more about having thousands of noisy communications satellites than it does about doing radio astronomy.

These are all a very fair points. Of note at least there is no giant leap on possibility. By that I mean there isn't a step with '?' in it.

But there is a big gap between what is technically possible and what is economically possible. Yes, with a limitless budget, they could probably over come the technical issues. But can it be done within a budget limitation.

I am with you however, I am very skeptical we will see this happen but more than happy to be proven wrong. It is easy to say something, it is the doing that matters. Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.

>nobody's ever even done that on earth

they test the martian rovers on earth before they send them in space. why do you think they wouldn't test this process and equipment before making launch a go?

The moon is much more homogeneous. A kilo of regolith is a kilo of regolith. You don't need to find ore.

Which is another way of saying: There is no ore!

Extracting pure elements out of undifferentiated regolith (dirt) is impractical and uneconomical here in Earth, even with abundant water, power, and even with chemicals such as carbon and acids. On the Moon you’d have to use a dry process in vacuum. What would that even look like!?

Everyone seems to treat this like it’s a computer game with +1 resources per tile just waiting to be collected by a harvester.

Explain in detail how you’d extract anything of industrial utility out of undifferentiated dirt, with a smelter light enough to launch on rockets for less than the cost of any alternative.

Because ores on earth get concentrated the amount of iron in typical soil is very low. But on the moon, it ranges about 2 to 10% of total weight.

> But on the moon, it ranges about 2 to 10% of total weight.

That would not be classified as iron ore at all! Mined ores contain up to 65% iron by weight. Also, typical iron ore contains very little other metals, simplifying smelting and other processing.

Moon rocks are a random undifferentiated mess.

I recently read Blindsight by Peter Watts[1], and the aliens in that book use cyclotrons to separate asteroid material into their component elements. This is done in orbit, in a vacuum.

Interestingly, something like that would work just fine on the Moon, because it has a negligible atmosphere -- essentially a hard vacuum. It might be possible to do an "outdoor" particle accelerator to separate regolith like a mass spectrometer.

Imagine a device that uses concentrated solar power (or solar cells and an e-beam furnace) to vaporise regolith, ionise it, and then use magnets to spread it out in a huge fan hundreds of meters in size. The mass-separated atoms could be sprayed out onto the landscape where they would freeze onto the bare surface of the Moon. You'd get patches of pure metals slowly but surely building up. This would have almost no moving parts and needs no chemicals, oxidisers, or other consumables.

[1] A book I can highly recommend for the HN audience. (It has been positively reviewed here previously, which is why I read it in the first place.)

If you want something really pure, or want things other than the core constituents, sure. Otherwise you can just smelt it. https://hothardware.com/news/blue-origin-details-lunar-plan-...

It's incredibly energy intensive and very inefficient compared to methods used on earth, but you aren't trying to compete with earth mining. You're trying to compete with the efficiency of shipping things to the moon.

There's a ton of methods available:

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/stmd/university-of-utah-ta...

You can also grind it and perform chemical extraction:

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/spacegrant/2023/all2023/44/

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