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Science & Technology
Can robots build a Moon base for astronauts? Japan hopes to find out.
2019-04-09
NASA did an R&D project with Caterpillar a few decades ago. They proved that internal combustion heavy equipment could work on the Moon. In the main they used diesels with natural gas and oxygen supplies.

The big problems were radiators and hydraulics.
Hydraulics need electric heat tape everywhere to keep the lines from freezing and insulation to keep them from boiling in the sun.
Radiators on earth bound machines are not really radiators rather cooling boxes with fluid. On the moon one needs real radiators or some effective way to shed the heat. On Mars the cooling boxes should be fine with fans having a larger airflow.

As to getting big equipment airborne. Well Musk's StarShip could be able to do so. It and it's first stage will mass 10,000 tons. That's about a Ticonderoga cruiser. Everything but the big rock crushers and some of the giant mining equipment should fit on it. (Worst dimension is the diameter - 9 meters)

All that said - electric is simpler to maintain.
Doing maintenance in a spacesuit has got to be a royal pain in the butt.
Tesla semi chassis could be modified into heavy equipment.
The Tesla SUVs and Cars into backhoes, small graders, cherry pickers, small cranes and the lot.
The Boston Dynamics robots would be fine for moving stuff around and portage.
Various AI packages could aid. Think OpenAI now owned by Musk?
The various life like Japanese and Korean robots would be great as upper body installs in existing equipment (so you don't need to modify everything) . Think of one of them installed at a factory workstation or behind the controls of a CAT.
Time lag to earth is about 4 seconds round trip so teleoperation is not beyond range.
For digging tunnels - Musk's little boring machine might fit for small diameter ones. I am sure he is looking at ways around the big grinding wheels. He has even tweeted about experiments with flame, sonic and lasers before the cutting heads. That's important as cutting heads are very heavy, huge and have a short lifetime. All something not good if they need to be launched out of Earth's gravity well.

Bigelow Aerospace has working models of inflatable space-stations and habitats. They have 2 inflatable stations in orbit for years and an inflatable module on the spacestation. The problem with the inflatables and other surface dwelling on the moon is protection from cosmic rays, solar flares and such. One really wants some rock and soil overhead most of the time for radiation reasons. But when in bootstrap mode Bigelow would be a GodSend! Also, as garages where one could work on equipment without a cumbersome spacesuit.

Cement also gets strange on the moon. A water based cement needs lots of water and water is precious. It't not that precious on earth so we still use Portland. There are other cement type reactions that make a strong rock composite. Many stronger than Portland without using water. The issue is that on earth Portland is cheap. In space? We should consider the other "cement" reactions and design space based equipment to mine and create it. It's not even clear what a cement mixer would look like for those formulations.

Posted by:Skidmark

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