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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.'"
For a better comparison, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers:
"The total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90-Martian-day (sol) primary mission was US$820 million." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover
The moon is a lot closer than Mars, so it doesn't seem entirely infeasible that they could do things significantly cheaper.
The grandparent was referring to "The moon is a harsh mistress" by Robert Heinlein. Worth a read, has held up very well despite it's age IMHO.
.: Max Romantschuk
On running the math a bit more: getting 1kg of payload mass to the moon with a soft landing is more like 1/1000 the cost of the round trip.
So, $2B for an automated moon-base is pretty reasonable.
Yes, I am a rocket scientist.
See, this is one of those places where we should discuss mass, not weight. Because it's not clear whether we're talking about robots which would weigh 660 pounds on earth or 660 pounds on the moon (which would be about 3960 pounds on Earth, quite a difference). The C-Net article (on which the PopSci article is based) took the information from a blog post from a Japanese Blog called Node. In that blog post, it says 300kg. The author of the C-Net article (Tim Hornyak) did the sloppy thing and just converted it to pounds without giving context. If you really want it in imperial units, the correct unit of mass is slugs. So the robots can be correctly described as being 300 kg, 20.56 slugs, or 660 pounds on Earth at sea-level.
http://codeflow.org/articles/why-to-the-moon.html
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