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Comment by voakbasda | Hacker News Reader

This is a really nice article that covers the history of space habitats, but it also made me realize that the future of habitable structures has questionable value outside of space tourism.

We have entered an age where humanoid robots are beginning to do many tasks that we thought were exclusively in our domain. At our current pace, I expect they will be able to outperform us in most work settings within a decade or two.

As those robots scale up in their capabilities and numbers, we will send up a fleet of them to space to do the work there. They are far more suited for the environment than humans, and the cost savings would be huge.

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The vast majority of work done in space is already done by machines.

Humanoid robots are potentially useful when operating in human environments, but that doesn’t really apply if we’re never sending humans to these locations.

Agreed, for space being humanoid is optional. Legs are superfluous for a start. However the issue with current automated systems we’re sending out there is they are function specific, and not very adaptable to novel or unanticipated activities.

This is why sending humans is often advantageous, we can do lots of different and new things. The ideal multipurpose space robot may not have to be humanoid, but it would need to replicate or ideally exceed this kind of flexibility of function.

The humans will end up spending 99% of their aggregate time in locations that are large enough to bore habitat out of solid rock. Moons, planetoids, substantial asteroids.

I thought most asteroids were basically just gravel piles loosely held together by internal gravity?

If we're talking about objects in the asteroid belt, the internal consistency varies wildly. Most smaller objects are indeed rubble piles: boulders, pebbles, and sand-like grains, down to dust. As you'd expect, they're very weak structurally. Notably, the OSIRIS-REx probe was nearly swallowed by its loose material during the sample collection on Bennu.

Some of the other large, iron-rich asteroids like Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Interamnia are more like protoplanets than rubble piles.

Besides the concern for structural integrity/stability, they also have reasonable amounts of water ice, volatiles, metals, ad other resources needed to supply an outpost.

Your claim about Bennu fascinated me...

"The spacecraft risked being swallowed whole by the asteroid as it collected the sample. As OSIRIS-REx touched the ground in October 2020, pebbles began flying about. The timely ignition of its thruster kept it safe and led to the creation of a puzzling large crater 8 meters (26 feet) across." https://www.iflscience.com/nasas-osiris-rex-was-almost-swall...

Wow.

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