President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond

Greetings Andrew,

You are correct that currently robots are not very
useful in space and treated like glass lest they
break. It will not stay this way and NASA can provide
the sort of leadership that it did in the 1960's with
material & engineering research. This is what gets
policitians to back a major project. They have
constituencies that benefit. We benefit by seeing our
dreams get closer to reality.

Eventually it will be desirable to put humans in space
to fix robots as the cost of sending up new ones will
exceed the cost of a human going up to fix them. At
current there is a gigantic cost differential between
sending a bunch of cargo to the moon and sending a
human. Especially in such a high risk environment
would you want a human to operate a front end loader?
Think of all of the industrial applications like
mining where they would buy reliable battle tested
robots by the thousands to mine coal and everything
else where the accident rate is high. The future is
in adopting and perfecting new technologies which is
exactely what NASA did with the Apollo missions.

The commission is likely to read only a few of the
comments and do what most political bodies do -
measure the public's interest by the volume of
comments it receives. The Sierra Club knows that
they can sway major ledgislation by simply getting
people to write, call, whatever. The politicians know
that in apathetic America, a single letter represents
10, 20, 50 voters that didn't bother. This is a
lottery I recommend playing if for no other reason
than to show that we care.

I assert that it is precisely the development of
technology that will get NASA and the politicians
fired up. It is not my pet project if it is the
enabler to all of the other ideas that have been
discussed on this message board. The military is
looking for modern battle field advances like robotic
planes. The science community would love powerful
exploration tools and facilities. The economic
community wants to take everything that was developed
to market and make some money out of it. This is what
funds the space movement to date. I wrote to the
commissions strengths and common interests and
sincerely hope you do as well.

- Thor

On Thursday, February 12, 2004, at 05:26 PM, Thor
> [...comment to Moon, Mars & beyond commission...]
> I encourage you to consider the benefits that a well
> developed base on the moon would offer to visiting
> astronauts - especially if it was built for them in
> advance by robots.

If we have robots capable of building a moonbase, we
have robots capable of doing most of the exploration a
human could do. I think you overestimate the
usefulness of robots. We should send robots to make
sure humans won't be killed by something obvious and
then send humans. If we really want robots, we'll
need to have humans in the neighborhood to fix them
anyway. Look at the Mars rovers - they are so worried
about damaging them that they move them only a tiny
amount at a time. If there was someone there to fix
problems the rovers could afford to
take risks. Machines can extend human capabilities,
but they simply do not have the necessary flexibility
to replace humans.

I suspect that the commission is going to get hundreds
of letters from technophiles pushing their pet idea,
be it nanotech, space elevators, scramjets, robots,
whatever. I hope they ignore all of these ideas.
Simple, pedestrian, boring, reliable technologies
should be used at every step of the way. If we let
this turn into yet another technology
development project, we'll never get anywhere.

Exploration is hard enough without adding needless
complexity.

......Andrew