Robotics for conquest of space

> I don't think robots are quite there yet. If they were,
> you'd see such set-ups on Earth. But robots can certainly
> be multipliers. You can build a Moon base with twenty
> people and a bunch of robots, and get more work done than
> five hundred people without the robots.*

I remember quite a while back Jerry Pournelle writing about being on a study looking at "can we set up a totally automated factory on the moon". They found that replacing about half the people was easy, replacing another quarter was considerably more difficult, replacing some others was flat-out impossible. He then suggested they simply change the scope of the study to "how few people can we get by with for a lunar factory". He was then told (to his tremendous upset) that NASA was not capable of getting people to the moon.

Regards,

Mike Combs