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Japan Plans Moon Base Built By Robots For Robots
An anonymous reader writes "The Japanese space agency, JAXA, has plans to build a base on the Moon by 2020. Not for humans, but for robots — and built by robots, too. A panel authorized by Japan's prime minister has drawn up preliminary plans for how humanoid and rover robots will begin surveying the moon by 2015, and then begin construction of a base near the south pole of the moon. The robots and the base will run on solar power, with total costs about $2.2 billion USD, according to the panel chaired by Waseda University President Katsuhiko Shirai. 'As currently envisioned, the robots that will land on the lunar surface in 2015 will be 660-pound behemoths equipped with rolling tank-like treads, solar panels, seismographs, high-def cameras, and a smattering of scientific instruments. They'll also have human-like arms for collecting rock samples that will be returned to Earth via rocket.'"
We should not forget that Japan has never recovered from their 'lost decade' after their stock market, real estate, and banking system collapsed in early 1990s.
By standard accounting practices, their entire country is bankrupt. What keeps them going is a collective refusal to balance accounts; a cultural need to 'save face' at any cost; brutal suppression of minorities, the elderly, and the disabled; and massive government spending on dubious public-works projects.
They are the world's masters at 'bridge-to-nowhere' projects. Where other countries would waste public funds on unwinnable foreign wars and dubious public 'wars-on-drugs', 'wars-on-poverty', 'wars-on-discrimination', the Japanese don't fight insane wars, don't get high, don't keep troublesome minorities around, and don't feel any need to be embarrassed by their discrimination against inferior humans.
Therefore a propensity towards ridiculous 'feel-good' but meaningless public works projects like moon exploration.
The only people who need to take the Japanese seriously are the people who live in Japan. The rest of us are only obliged (the root of the word 'abrigato') to be courteous, polite, and respectful in our personal dealing with the Japanese, and fair in our business dealings. But we are under no obligation to take anything that they do seriously.
You'll have to excuse my [sigh],
Please excuse my {sigh} at the infinite inability of spacefaring Slashdaughters to understand contemporary political and economic reality.
If you combine all commercially rendered space services, and then also add all the funding scientific missions get, you're at a multi trillion market a year.
There is no market. Space funding is a government expense. It doesn't follow any of the economic rules that compose markets. It's all liabilities with no assets. It's not an investment with a reasonable expected rate of return. Governments fund space exploration because no business will do it. Governments do it for 'national prestige', military advantage, or old-fashioned corruption. There is no multi-trillion market in space, there is no market at all. There never has been and there never will be a commercially-successful business venture (that is, one that is not government subsided) in space.
Building an industrial complex on the moon doesn't help you lift things off earth. What it does do is let you launch things off the moon, into earth orbit and elsewhere, quite easily.
The cost of getting manufactured items and industrial complexes to the moon in the first place far exceeds any reduced cost of getting things from the moon to earth orbit.
If you can build and launch things off the moon, you can suddenly offer a service that is worth trillions a year in Earth dollars, at a marginal cost.
What, precisely, is that service? There is nothing on the moon. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars to put things on the moon is not going to turn into trillions of value by sending them back, regardless of marginal cost.
Yes, there is an up-front investment to make it happen. Yes that investment is rather large.
I'm going to assume that there is an American on the other end of this conversation. 20th-century Americans are prone to economic fantasy because they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is that their country and their government is broke. There is no trillion dollars for space explorations. There is no trillion dollars for anything. There is no trillion dollars left anywhere in the USA.
There WAS a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $600,000 mortgages to janitors. There was a trillion dollars spent on federal government budget deficits. Money is not a physical good. Money can be created out of nothing and can disappear back to nothing. Technical people never understand this. They don't study economics, and they don't understand economics.
There was trillions of dollars unwisely spent...and 'there was' means the past. America was rich, now it's not. There was money in the past but there isn't going to be in the future. The trillions of dollars that 20th-century American space enthusiasts believe could and should be spent on the glorious future in space and it's endless possiblities for the betterment of humanity doesn't exist. It's spent-- it's gone. The Burger Kings and endless suburban strip malls is what you got for it. It's all that you're going to get. This is the great tragedy that is America and what it could have been, but isn't and now never will be.
Space Exploration is a 20th century American quasi-religion that is beginning to manifest itself as a mental disease among those people who believed it too strongly.
Yep, and the biggest optimist is the idiot prime minister. With the Japanese government kinda broke, the "alien" Hatoyama and his cabinet gone in a day or two, and his (well, his master's) party to be thrashed and obliterated in the coming elections, I am not sure this project has a bright future. Which is probably a pity.