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Comment by abecedarius | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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...

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.

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.

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