I'm pretty skeptical, as a general rule if something has never been done on earth before you're not going to do it in space. Not that I think this is impossible, but nobody even has autonomous mining and construction abilities on earth, and they're going to do that on the moon with an extremely limited ability to perform manual maintenance (I'm sure they have some sort of remote manually-operated drone in mind but again, nobody's ever even done that on earth and they're going to do it in space).
TFA also left out that it's not only going to be a PoC for autonomous mining and manufacturing, but also autonomous refining. When the Toyota corporation built my car they didn't start with unrefined steel ore. I don't even know how they're going to do that in a vacuum where there's no fires and no convection.
> When the Toyota corporation built my car they didn't start with unrefined steel ore.
Well, actually, they did.[1] Toyota has their own steel mills. "Great cars are made with great steel".
I'm fairly sure it has not been done on earth because labor is simply cheaper, not because it's technologically impossible.
The point here I think is that we should try doing autonomous operations on Earth first not because they are cheaper - they are not - but because it's cheaper to try them on Earth than on the Moon. When we have these tests successful on Earth, we can send the systems to the Moon.
But I'm sure this is being done.
> But I'm sure this is being done.
By whom?
If you'd plan an operation on the Moon which was using robots to e.g. gather the ground, transport it to a melting plant and melt the materials, splitting it into gases and solid or liquid parts, wouldn't you first try to give those robots a test on Earth? Probably simulated rocks, maybe in a big vacuum chamber, but still? I would definitely consider that. And I think those who work on such projects are thinking about that as well.
Robotic manipulation in unstructured environments still doesn't work well. It's embarrassing. Just picking items from bins at human speed or better still doesn't work in production. Amazon has spent much effort on this. This is what current technology looks like.[1] That's with machine learning.
In the early 1980s, some people at Stanford were talking about building something on the moon with robots by the year 2000. I asked "How soon can you do that in Utah?" They didn't like that.
There's a lot of AI progress now though. Here are some deepmind football robots https://youtu.be/ET-MmoeSvXk?t=435
Robot soccer has been around for years. It's still not very good. Here's the current level of performance.[1]
Earth seems a much hairier environment. Air means weather, water is notoriously corrosive, and random wildlife and microorganisms are hair squared. And initially nobody's going to care about preserving the wilderness. It is true we mostly don't have to worry about meteors and hard radiation, and the local temperature range is smaller.
There were some design studies of lunar resources and their extraction in the 70s, iirc using solar furnaces. I think I read about this in https://space.nss.org/colonies-in-space-by-t-a-heppenheimer/ almost that long ago.
The novelty and distance are a challenge but maybe less of one than the problems for autonomy on Earth?
> Earth seems a much hairier environment.
Absolutely not. In space you have to dela with things like radiation, extreme temperatures, or cold welding of joints. Energy supply can be a big issue depending on your environment. On the moon you have to deal with extremely abrasive dust.
The most critical issue in space is how difficult it is to fix things: If you can get a human there, they will be constrained by airlocks and space suits. In most cases it will be impossible to get anybody there and you need to construct 100% reliable or self-repairing machines. This is extremely difficult.
Automation is especially challenged by richly varying or adversarial conditions. The moon has much less of both than the Earth; i.e. Earth is "hairier". I already agreed that the particular conditions include new problems; in fact I already listed your first two.
BTW spacesuits could probably be much better for repair work; they seem like another area where NASA has stagnated.
The moon has something Earth hasn’t and as far as I have seen it seems nobody has figured out how to handle it yet. Moon dust.
“The tiny, electrostatically charged particles made of crushed lunar rock clung to every surface, from spacesuits to electronics, and even infiltrated the astronauts’ lungs. Crews tried using a brush or their hands to sweep the sharp, abrasive dust off their spacesuits, but neither method proved very effective.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nasas-moon-dust-pr...
On Earth you need to compete against other people doing the same. So you design on the edge of performance to extract the last few percents of efficiency to compete on price against all the other people doing the same thing. Which means the machines are complicated, use rare materials and require a lot of maintenance.
On the Moon you can do the simplest thing that works and if it works at 10% efficiency and breaks after 1 year - so be it, if it's enough time to get resources to make a new one.
Basically space exploration will have a lot more in common with industrial revolution than with overengineered spacematerial NASA stuff.
If we have to make the tractors 10x bigger to have the same power and output, and to use disposable steel cables instead of hydraulics, and to make them disposable after 2 years instead of lubricating them to last 20 years - that's all fine if it means it can work with lunar materials only.
Probably budgets are different as well. Why automate something you can do cheaper with operators? We may be able to automate things on earth but at a prohibitive price with respect to competitors. On the moon your competitors would have the same limitations —ie you’ll just have to pay up to get it to work.
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It's a WILD assumption that they won't prototype their setup "locally" in a most moon-like location they can find, before going to the dark side of the moon.
The moon is much more homogeneous. A kilo of regolith is a kilo of regolith. You don't need to find ore.
Which is another way of saying: There is no ore!
Extracting pure elements out of undifferentiated regolith (dirt) is impractical and uneconomical here in Earth, even with abundant water, power, and even with chemicals such as carbon and acids. On the Moon you’d have to use a dry process in vacuum. What would that even look like!?
Everyone seems to treat this like it’s a computer game with +1 resources per tile just waiting to be collected by a harvester.
Explain in detail how you’d extract anything of industrial utility out of undifferentiated dirt, with a smelter light enough to launch on rockets for less than the cost of any alternative.
Because ores on earth get concentrated the amount of iron in typical soil is very low. But on the moon, it ranges about 2 to 10% of total weight.
> But on the moon, it ranges about 2 to 10% of total weight.
That would not be classified as iron ore at all! Mined ores contain up to 65% iron by weight. Also, typical iron ore contains very little other metals, simplifying smelting and other processing.
Moon rocks are a random undifferentiated mess.
I recently read Blindsight by Peter Watts[1], and the aliens in that book use cyclotrons to separate asteroid material into their component elements. This is done in orbit, in a vacuum.
Interestingly, something like that would work just fine on the Moon, because it has a negligible atmosphere -- essentially a hard vacuum. It might be possible to do an "outdoor" particle accelerator to separate regolith like a mass spectrometer.
Imagine a device that uses concentrated solar power (or solar cells and an e-beam furnace) to vaporise regolith, ionise it, and then use magnets to spread it out in a huge fan hundreds of meters in size. The mass-separated atoms could be sprayed out onto the landscape, collected in patches tens of meters wide where they would freeze onto the bare surface of the Moon. So you'd get patches of pure metals slowly but surely building up. This would have almost no moving parts and needs no chemicals, oxidisers, or other consumables.
[1] A book I can highly recommend for the HN audience. (It has been positively reviewed here previously, which is why I read it in the first place.)
>> if something has never been done on earth before you're not going to do it in space.
Well, with the rate at which we are launching thousands of loud satellites, radio astronomy may simply have to move to space. Maybe not the moon, but we will need to get the telescopes somewhere above the satellite constellations if we want to continue doing radio astronomy.
Do we actually want to continue doing radio astronomy? I'm not sure we do.
Sure, some people would like it, but where is the money going to come from? Are governments really willing to spend the money needed to move radio astronomy into space or to the Moon? I seriously doubt it. I think it's pretty obvious that we (humanity) care more about having thousands of noisy communications satellites than it does about doing radio astronomy.
The JPL position is that telescopes should be in space, not on Luna. Too much dust. Too much gravity. A lunar farside optical telescope was proposed, but it would be inferior to one in open space.
You didn't read the article, it _specifically_ mentions JPL's proposal for the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope concept "nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (J.P.L.) is also exploring the idea of a radio-wave detector, the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (L.C.R.T.), inside a 1.3-kilometre-wide moon crater."
https://www.nasa.gov/general/lunar-crater-radio-telescope-lc...
That's a much simpler project. It's deployment, not construction. Two metric tons of mesh have to be soft landed at the bottom of the crater. Then mobile robots pull it open into a large dish.[1] There's a cheaper approach where the mesh is pulled open by weights shot out from the central lander. Cost estimates are in the US$1 billion to US$10 billion range, most of which is shipping cost to Luna Farside.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/d4pivfipd9rpb19fm87lq/LCRT_NI...
If you don't see the contradiction in JPL having an active research project to put a radio telescope on the moon and your original statement then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
From the article: "FarView would comprise a hundred thousand metal antennas made on-site by autonomous robots. It would cover a Baltimore-size swath of the moon." That's way beyond anything possible today. What JPL proposes is just packing up a big thing tightly and unpacking it at the destination. Space projects have been doing that for decades.
When someone assembles a solar farm in the desert with no humans on site, we can talk about doing something like that on Luna.
There was an interesting Fraser Cain YT vid a couple of weeks back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcR6gs0Up6k
Interview with Gerard van Belle, director or the Lowell Observatory.
The topic was space/lunar optical interferometers. It's easier to do this on the Moon than in space, as there's no formation flying. He's got a "menu" of projects from a few/small unit telescopes right up to lunar manufacturing like this.
The SpaceX 'Starship Human Landing System' is supposed to land on the moon in 2025 or so and should have a cargo variant able to deliver quite a few tons of gear. It would interesting to send some prototype telescope stuff. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS)
That would be great if that can happen, plus I hope the can build a Radio Telescope on the Moon with it.
That should avoid all the Radio Interference that plagues Earth Based Radio Telescopes.
until the moonbases need moon-orbiting comms satellites?
With no atmosphere, laser links might be better; like Starlink is working on for inter-satellite comms.
True. The reason could be that the Earth interference is worse and less controllable.
Let's say this works, and they paint a lot of metal lines that form workable antennas on the moon surface.
How do you aim that thing at a specific point in the sky?
Probably like Arecibo, by moving the collector around in relative to the reflector material. To be honest though aiming the mirror is way down their list of problems to solve to make this work. They basically want to create several brand new industries in an inhospitable environment with little to no payoff. It is hard to see a path to success in any reasonable timeframe.
It's called phased array. Pretty mature tech now.
I don't know about radio telescopes but it does sound like a good platform, no atmosphere, no magnetosphere, etc. Is it just me or does this sounds like a more viable goal for the next 20 years, than Mars.
It's just so simple and clean though, if we can't do something this basic yet so useful, we should just stop all the space stuff and go back to bombing each other to death until the planet completely melts and floods in 50 years because we're done. Type-Zero civilization.
* https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/niac2020_ban...
* https://www.nasa.gov/general/lunar-crater-radio-telescope-lc...
> a small startup called Lunar Resources
Ah yes, the 'ole investor pump and dump. Get a bunch of people excited enough to give you millions, make enough to retire and then just disappear in a whiff.
Why would a moon telescope be desirable over a satellite telescope?
FTA: "Unlike telescopes such as the Hubble and the James Webb, which are made from mirrors and lenses, FarView would comprise a hundred thousand metal antennas made on-site by autonomous robots. It would cover a Baltimore-size swath of the moon."
They want to build a radio telescope, not a simple optical telescope.
Thanks. Still, this doesn't answer my question about why build it on the moon and not in space.
the size. An optical telescope is limited by the size of the mirror which needs to be one continuous surface (though not necessarily smooth for instance the JWT but I digress), but a radio telescope doesnt, it can be many individual collectors that can be joined together. This enables it to be much larger so it can collect more signal, and the radio waves are much longer so it needs to be much larger. In an extreme example we have used many different radio telescopes together with very precise timing to produce the images of the black holes at the center of M87 and the milky way.
But it requires those different clusters of collectors to be stationary - so while you could probably build a swarm of satellites, they would have to stay in very precise distances from each other over time which would be considerably more difficult than planting them on a surface.
Also, a big shield like the moon blocking out radio interference coming from the earth is desirable.
IANAA, corrections to my understandings welcome
I'd flip your comment about optical surfaces: they need to be smooth, not continuous, and smoothness is actually not required either! The requirement is a consistent phase relationship, which allows the signals to add together nicely via interference. Rays coming from same direction take the same path to the detector and interfere constructively, while rays coming from different directions tend to cancel.
For optical frequencies, the phase is difficult to measure directly, so we instead polish the surfaces down to a fraction of the wavelength of light (so that it all has the same phase). For radio telescope, the frequency is a lot lower, and we actually can measure the phase directly, so we can make our sensors crazy shapes and adjust it by adding delay. If you can change the individual delays (say, via software) you can change how they interfere and therefore change the sensitive direction for your telescope. This is how phased arrays function.
Why is it difficult to measure the phase directly for optical wavelength as opposed to radio? Is it purely because the shift is smaller?
It's really fast. Visible frequencies are in the THz to PHz range, while radio frequencies are in the kHz. Modern electronics are fast enough to sample the latter but not the former.
Radio frequencies are in KHz to THz range. There is equipment already operating in sub-THz bands but not yet close to the frequencies of light.
sorry, yeah, thats a much better way of saying it and my smooth vs continuous was just confusing
Your comment was great! I'm not trying to correct you so much as adding additional context.
So, wouldn't it still be easier to build a radio telescope from orbiting satellites than on the Moon?
This was already explained very clearly.
But it requires those different clusters of collectors to be stationary - so while you could probably build a swarm of satellites, they would have to stay in very precise distances from each other over time which would be considerably more difficult than planting them on a surface.
> difficult than planting them on a surface.
Even considering that the "surface" in question is the moon?
We know how to make thrusters. We don't know how to mine the moon and make a telescope from scratch.
It sounds like the solution is to attach the satellites to some sort of frame that could be assembled in orbit by simple robots.
they would have to stay in very precise distances from each other over time
Is this necessary, or do they simply need to precisely distinguish their relative position? My understanding of the JWT's not-perfectly-smooth lens is that the ability to measure (and correct for) its distortions vastly simplified the construction, and I naively think the same principle could be used in a swarm of satellites.
It’s difficult to keep things spaced out properly in microgravity without scaffolding. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford
They're planning to build this telescope on the Moon, by mining Moon rocks.
In space, there are no rocks to mine, so you're have to launch all the material to space, which is wildly impractical/expensive.
I guess local resources are easier to use locally, rather than launching to orbit first? You also have a firm base to mount the antenna, and the process of mounting could be arguably easier.
The idea is they dig trenches in the shapes of antenna and cast them in place. Its not even as complex as mounting them on the ground.
Easier to build it where the materials are than try to launch a city-sized radio telescope.
I think humans currently have a hard time deploying a 20km by 20km object in space.
It’s easier to deploy in the weightless environment of orbit than on the moon with gravity. Consistent with this, the largest off-Earth structure ever built (the ISS) is in orbit, not on a heavenly body.
Sure, but it's even easier to not have to worry about deploying at all. The largest structures we've built were built in-situ.
It requires deployment either way. The largest ships we have that go to the moon are no larger than those going to orbit.
Can't believe you don't see the other reasons why ISS is on orbit.
I think you have misread my comment.
To be fair, we also have this problem on the moon.
I feel that a 20km wide telescope may have a hard time fitting in a fairing.
imagine a roller coaster on the moon...
A roller coaster could actually be a good way to move things around. With lower gravity than earth, and initial thrust could take a payload a predetermined distance effectively.
articles like this make me wish I could be reading it on a magazine
That’s available! I miss the tactile experience myself. Hmmmm…
In 2022, I bought a yearly subscription of the paper version of Scientific American in an attempt to recreate the childhood feeling of reading it. I am glad I did but I only received six out of 12 issues, in two packets of three. Plus it has become highly political, so I won't be doing it again.
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