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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Maintenance would be orders of magnitude easier.

JWST is actually a good example. The (slow) unfolding of the telescope was a long-term nail-biting experience, because even very trivial problems that could have been easily fixed with a screwdriver or a finger poke on Earth could doom one of the most sophisticated pieces of scientific equipment ever produced.

We were lucky in the end, but if anything went wrong, the result would be immense frustration and the most expensive piece of space junk per unit of weight.

But in general, you probably don't need human bodies for such maintenance on the Moon, "just" very sophisticated and versatile robot mechanics. IDK what is easier.

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We're going to spend many, many billions to send food to feed and house people on the moon just so they can go out and turn a screw driver and untangle some wires once in a while.

True, but the situation scales.

Maybe you can save a lot on the equipment itself (because it does not have to be 99,99999% reliable - those extra nines cost a lot) and thus can also deploy more equipment, and instead of a single telescope you can have several farms thereof.

Wouldn't you demand the habitation and transportation facilities to be even more reliable than the telescopes? Wouldn't they be even harder to build right due to now needing to incorporate lots of large pressure vessels and windows and airlocks and seals and actual buttons and what not? Plus, all the needed stuff to actually get these people home again?

So not only do we still need to have an incredibly high degree of reliability for core critical parts of the mission, that mission is now massively larger, and it's now human lives on the line if things go wrong.

Can't we still have farms of telescopes if we wanted even if a few of them don't deploy perfectly?

Can't we just have a humanoid robot go and turn the screws for us?

"Can't we just have a humanoid robot go and turn the screws for us?"

That would indeed be the best solution, if we can build such robots. Notoriously, computers are much better at "thinking" (or simulating thereof) than at folding laundry.

"it's now human lives on the line if things go wrong."

That is quite normal in many professions. Programmers are usually somewhat sheltered, so the very idea of risking your life on a job is shocking to them. But I grew up in a mining town and, well, some people will take that bargain for money. Some people even like the bit of a thrill.

I grew up in South Houston. I knew lots of families affected by workplace injuries at chemical plants and refineries growing up (for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_refinery_explosion ). I grew up going to Challenger Seven Memorial Park all the time. I had met a few of the people on the Columbia. Many of my friends had their parents go up in the shuttle afterwards, very clued into the risks involved. The idea of risking your life on a job is not shocking to me, it surrounded me from a young age.

I'm just pointing out the risk of failure and its impacts on the overall program is much higher when we're talking about humans experiencing a massive sudden depressurization event compared to a foil sheet failing to unfurl. If you think its expensive trying to get a foil sheet to reliably unfold once, imagine how expensive it'll be to design a door to properly seal and unseal hundreds of times with sharp, hard, and fine regolith constantly working its way into the seams and hinges and seals. If you think it'll be difficult getting public support after your telescope isn't perfectly functional, imagine the reluctance of funding you'll get when you accidentally kill seven people in a horrific way.

Luckily the robot doesn't need to be humanoid. The JWST deploying itself was one large, single-use robot.

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