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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.'"
I would imagine that the prices drop dramatically once you don't have to worry about sending humans up, keeping them alive, and returning them safely.
The price drop occurs when you limit the scope of your mission to what two robots can do. Yes, a small, relatively simple robotic mission is cheaper than a complex manned mission, but it also does less. I will say that due to the small communication delay with Earth, the argument for a manned presence is far less compelling than it'll be for anything outside of the Earth-Moon system. You really can run complex operations mostly from Earth via teleoperations. That's not an option that works well on Mars, for example.
What they currently have can put close to 20 ton payload into LEO; that should be comfortably sufficient for robotic "base", in few shots.
(and it's in the league of SpaceX anyway; especially if Japan modifies (only) their heaviest launcher even more - it is already a modification of one which could put half the above payload into LEO)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Yeah, you get less. But, man-oh-man, this seems like very high value. For comparison, here are some expenditures from groups that "can't afford" to go to the moon:
It's such a small amount of money, I can't even believe it's true.
I'm starting to grow a bit tired of repeating this, but He3 is not the ultimate fusion fuel. It's only because it's an exotic off world resource that it gets all the hype.
The benefits of He3 is that it's a aneutronic fuel, but it is definitely not the only such fuel, and considerin the shipping cost from the moon it is quite likely that He3 will have a hard time competing with other aneutronic fuels.
Also, The temperature requried for He3 fusion is higher than for other fuels, so to actually get anything out of He3 fusion we're probably going to wait until second generation commercial fusion reactors pop up, the first ones that will feed our grid and establish the standards for fusion energy are unlikely to be He3 fusion reactors. Probably, we won't bother to ever use He3 fusion on earth, possibly we won't even bother to use it on the moon either.
OK, here's a question for you then. I understand the moon's surface is made up of a bunch of tiny particulate - "dust" is you will. This dust, as I understand, got into everything during the Apollo Moon Missions. Now, for arguments sake, let's say Japan is able to install a moon base operated wholly (locally) by robots.
What kinds of effects would the dust have upon the rails, pathways, gears and whatever other machinery is necessary to operate? I imagine that the gust would wear down the machinery and the robots might not have the ability to recognize wear and tear in such an environment - both on themselves and the machinery.
I think it boils down to this: If we send humans to the Moon, they'll be remarkably like the humans Mark I we sent in 1969, while the most advanced robot we could have sent then was probably a digital watch. In 2050, if we still send humans for a round three they'll still be very similar to the 1969 humans, while if we send robots the next generation is likely to be much, much better than the last one. That means to a country running a space program, which hopefully have a little bit of foresight beyond this one mission, robots are still the way to go.
Also, I think many people grossly exaggerate the "doing" part of science. We can design the mission down here, we can do the analysis down here, only very rarely does a scientist discover something to change his plans so on the fly that we couldn't tell the robot to go back and do it again tomorrow. If the robot lacks the tools, it's very likely a human would also lack the tools. The execution can be a fairly set of simple menial tasks like collect rocks, photograph every sample, put in processing chamber, wait for analysis - no great intelligence required. It's not like we're going to bring a huge lab of equipment we might use if and only if we found something interesting, humans or not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You think that's bad? Wait till you compare $2.2 billion to what some companies spend on advertising.
Advertising Age estimated global measured advertising expenditure of $2.7bn in 2008, making Coca-Cola the world's #6 advertiser.
Source.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
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.
Sorry, but that simply isn't true. For any space mission, a very large chunk of the total cost is the cost of getting the payload into Earth orbit. Once there, you can use high-efficiency low-energy transfer orbits to get to just about anywhere in the solar system, with very little in the way of energy expenditure compared to the trip up to orbit.
The only real difference between having the Moon as a target as opposed to Mars is that the Mars mission will have a transit time measured in years, as opposed to days for the the Moon mission. For manned missions, those transit times are very significant (life support requirements), but for unmanned missions they don't add substantially to the cost.
Costs do increase with distance (you have to pay ground controllers to monitor things during those longer transits), but the the difference isn't as great as you appear to believe.
Don't tell me to get a life. I had one once. It sucked.