[ExI] Power sats and the industrial development of space (was global waming again)

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 11:37 PM, Jeff Davis <jrd1415 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 8:40 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It's going to take at least ten tons of stuff landed on the moon for
>> materials and living space per person.  For a thousand people, that's
>> ten thousand tons, or 10 million kg.  If you try to do this with
>> current rockets, and taking the cost to the moon as the same as to
>> GEO, that' $20,000/kg x 10 million kg or $200 billion just for
>> transport cost.
>
> I'm sorry.  I thought I was clear.  The one thousand moon workers
> wouldn't go to the moon.  They would perform their work by
> teleoperation, employing hamster-size robots.  How much then to get a
> thousand hampsters and their miniaturized industrial combine to the
> moon?

We don't have teleporated robots of this sort, not to mention the
speed of light delay problem.  But if we did an they were there, what
are you going to *do* with them?  You can't just say ":mine the moon,"
the moon is effectively dirt.  What chemical processes are you going
to use?  What is power budget?  How are you going to make parts?

I have seen a proposal to mine the moon to make silicon solar cells.
It was by real process engineers.  Took 20 years and 2 trillion
dollars.  I don't recall if it involved any people on the moon.

Keithh

> Sure be nice to know how much that mini combine would weigh.  Yo,
> Bryan, care to comment?  What basic tool set would my thousand
> hamster-sized robots need in order to process the raw materials, build
> the moon base, and make more bots?  Minimum mass; lunar regolith
> starting materials;...

> Best, Jeff Davis
>
>  "Everything's hard till you know how to do it."
>                          Ray Charles
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