[time-nuts] Re: constructing a moon base

[Bob kb8tq]

Hi

Indeed the grader and the remote installation both may be “people-less” much
of the time. The “stuff” in those installations (that are big enough to require 
real roads between them) is going to take some significant lift capacity. 

Does the road go in ahead of the first installation? Seems unlikely …

More or less:

“Let’s do a space telescope on the moon”. You build up a device or more likely
a set of devices. They get tossed into orbit and eventually land. By some means
they plug into each other. The site comes to life and does its thing. Is it 10M in 
diameter or a hundred?… who knows. No road or significant pre-construction 
needed either way. Lift capacity … yup. Are folks involved on site at any point? 
Back to those grubby details …. Are there masers? … who knows. 

In terms of a continuously operating site, this “drop in pre package”  is (at least 
to me) going to happen much earlier than sites with a road network between them.  
Is even this a decade or many decades out …. unclear right now.

Do folks drive repair trucks on the roads or do robots? Not clear, but both would 
be supporting a pretty significant bunch of stuff for roads to make sense. Some sort
of 4/6/8 WD rover that does not require a road (but maybe can’t carry a lot) could 
get simple stuff done. 

Bob

> On Sep 29, 2021, at 2:19 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
> 
> --------
> Bob kb8tq writes:
> 
>> Road building and graders sort of implies moving large amounts of “stuff” 
>> onto the lunar surface. While a “road to nowhere” on earth might happen,
>> I’d bet you only build one on the moon to connect inhabited installations 
>> to other full blown (inhabited or not) sites of some sort. 
> 
> It's funny how peoples thinking about this is still firmly cast in
> a 1950'ies NASA/science-fiction mindset.
> 
> People really do not grasp how much work robots can do.
> 
> One place I really see this is when people look at my lawnmower robot
> and go "There's no /way/ that can handle 5000 m² of lawn..."
> 
> But the thing is: If a human did it on a garden-tractor once a week,
> we'd want it done quickly, so lots of power, wide cutting board and
> so on.
> 
> But the robot has 168 times as much time[1] for the same job, so
> it does not even need one percent of the power of the garden-tractor,
> in particular because it does not have to lug 100 kg of human &
> associated creature-comforts around.
> 
> If we need a road on the moon, we will launch robots and let them
> get on with the job, and they'll be done way ahead of when we arrive,
> probably not even leaving us a few really largish boulders to blow up.
> 
> In other words: The grader on the moon will at most be a meter wide.
> 
> Poul-Henning
> 
> 
> [1] The quoted capacity for lawn-mower robots is for 24hx7d, but
> in general you should not let it work while dark, for the sake
> of the other inhabitants in your lawn:  Porcupines etc.
> 
> -- 
> Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
> phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
> FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
> Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.