Robotic Lifeforms To Go To Moon

HarmlessScenery writes "A space.com story gives details about a commercial company that is planning its own moon mission. The idea is to send two robots to collect moon rock for sale here on Earth. The company hopes to make a profit from the rock, and selling access to live Web-cams and from toys / merchandising based on the robots.
Mark W. Tilden at Los Alamos National Lab, is lined up to design the robots. His personal objective is to get a whole robotic ecosystem up there, to prepare the way for human colonisation. The first batch will clear dust from a large area (after completing their rock gathering) - which might hamper future missions. Subsequent robotic generations could build solar farms and lay cable networks to provide a usable power grid."

Comments

Mark Tilden

[dstanfor]

I don't know about anyone else out there, but I'm really fascinated by Mark Tilden's work. This just adds to the fascination. Mark is piggy-backing on this companies desire to get these moon-rocks so that he can get his robots up to the moon. His robots will cost $100 dollars, which is probably 6 orders of magnitude cheaper than any other robots sent out in space. Granted, the robots won't be much smarter then the moon rocks and dust that they'll be pushing around, but it's still cool.

Mark's robots are mostly analog, which is completely opposite of most robotocists (sp?) designs. It's crazy, but they end up working, and performing the desired task. They end up doing it because they are light seeking, and their task becomes a side-effect of the robots movement, like his lawnmower that cuts grass that cover's it solar panel, or his window washer that cleans the glass so it has more sunlight. Of course they aren't living, but there as close as any other robots out there now.