President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond

> I respectfully disagree.
> A moonbase is close enough to allow remote control and close
> monitoring, and self-replicating automated lunar factory system,
> capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the
> long run, exploration of the entire solar system within a reasonable
> timeframe, IMHO, holds the key to the future of the exploration of
> space, and any other approach would be very short-sighted and short
> lived by comparison, with a fraction of the benefits self replicating
> system would bring.

No self replicating nonbiological system exists. Putting such an
enormous technology development task in the critical path for lunar
exploration all but guarantees failure. The program you propose
requires enormous amounts of R&D and long planning timelines. All
that's necessary to derail it is a change of administration or a
recession.

Why make things more complex than they need to be? If self-replicating
factories are possible, build on independent of the return to the moon.
That way if it fails the lunar plans are intact. If it succeeds,
there will be small scale infrastructure on the moon to help setting up
the first factory.

> Systems like these, considerate feasible by a a NASA study, conducted
> in 1980 by request of newly-elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost
> of 11.7 million dollars, are well within our current technology and
> have little to do with having robots that can do al the exploration
> humans can.

NASA claimed X-33 would lead to low cost space access. Note the lack
of low cost space access despite funding X-33 even beyond the amount
initially budgeted. NASA studies prove little.

Self replicating factories are not even close to being well within
current technology. I have looked into the problem of self
replication, and it's much harder than it looks.

Here's a simple project which you ought to be able to do at home:
Build a self replicating system out of Lego or some other construction
toy. I'm not suggesting it has to build the blocks - those can be
given as feedstock. Anything that can take an unsorted collection of
lego blocks and build a replica of itself will impress the hell out of
me.

I'm not opposed to research on self replicating systems, in fact I
would like to see more of it. What I oppose is putting such a
difficult task in the critical path for lunar exploration.

......Andrew