Robotics for conquest of space

Exactly why we should take the job away from them and give it to someone more capable (and I have NO doubt that there are many such, given that level of funding).

From: Combs, Mike
Sent: Monday, April 11, 2011 11:04 AM
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [spacesettlers] Re: : 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