this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Robots, in particular mining equipment robots that everyone seems to be jazzed up about, they need maintenance. Earth bound mining equipment has minor service intervals of 250 hours of operation, major intervals every thousand hours, machine-stopping breakdowns occur on a bathtub curve but there would be a dozen or so before the first 4000 hours of operation.
For reference, 4000 hours of operation is less than half a year of 24/7 work.
Even with the addition of a few hundred million per machine in hardening and robustness, the environment they will work in is much, much worse than earth. Seals will need frequent replacement, the parts that do the digging need replacement, hoses will burst or leak, etc etc.
On the moon you could (probably) laboriously tele-operate repair robots with the 2.5 second lag you'd have to Earth.
Mars? Not possible.
So I look at all these plans, where they'll send ice mining equipment to mars to run for two years unattended to make fuel and what-not, and with my 30 years of experience in the mining industry on earth, I just say, "that must be some good crack they're smoking".
Someone is going to have to go, just to repair and maintain all the machines.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. For Mars I agree it's not possible with the insane delay, unless AI will be able to automonously repair, something which might be possible in the future. But for the moon it would be much cheaper to remote control repairs. I've seen what surgeons can do with remote controlled machines for precision surgery. The delay still might be annoying but maybe that can improve by using laser instead of radio waves.
Cars are mostly, if not completely, built by precision robots. Why not have a precision robot replace and lubricate parts on the moon?
But first we need to find a way to mine on the moon in the first place. Regolith is extremity nasty stuff, nothing survives long with that tiny sharp dust. The people who went to the moon complained a lot about it. It gets everywhere, it sticks to every surface and shreds everything. There's also the radiation, micro meteors and extreme temperature fluctuations.