Japan Plans Moon Base Built By Robots For Robots 253
An anonymous reader writes "The Japanese space agency, JAXA, has plans to build a base on the Moon by 2020. Not for humans, but for robots — and built by robots, too. A panel authorized by Japan's prime minister has drawn up preliminary plans for how humanoid and rover robots will begin surveying the moon by 2015, and then begin construction of a base near the south pole of the moon. The robots and the base will run on solar power, with total costs about $2.2 billion USD, according to the panel chaired by Waseda University President Katsuhiko Shirai. 'As currently envisioned, the robots that will land on the lunar surface in 2015 will be 660-pound behemoths equipped with rolling tank-like treads, solar panels, seismographs, high-def cameras, and a smattering of scientific instruments. They'll also have human-like arms for collecting rock samples that will be returned to Earth via rocket.'"
Re:and why, exactly? (Score:2, Informative)
I believe the grandparent means "take the moon seriously" (concatenate the title and the text).
Re:Just $2.2 Billion? (Score:3, Informative)
One-way trips only half as much? More like 1/100th.
Apollo was on the edge of the possible: everything was maxed out to just get a few hundred pounds of rocks back to earth: huge 3 stage rocket, complex LEM + command module on the far end to hold energy costs down, piles of heat shielding, etc, for a difficult insertion back into the earth's orbit. Plus, as you say, all the junk needed to keep your automation systems (people) alive.
Re:Just $2.2 Billion? (Score:5, Informative)
"The total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90-Martian-day (sol) primary mission was US$820 million." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Exploration_Rover [wikipedia.org]
The moon is a lot closer than Mars, so it doesn't seem entirely infeasible that they could do things significantly cheaper.
Re:The start of the revolution... (Score:5, Informative)
The grandparent was referring to "The moon is a harsh mistress" by Robert Heinlein. Worth a read, has held up very well despite it's age IMHO.
Re:Just $2.2 Billion? (Score:5, Informative)
On running the math a bit more: getting 1kg of payload mass to the moon with a soft landing is more like 1/1000 the cost of the round trip.
So, $2B for an automated moon-base is pretty reasonable.
Yes, I am a rocket scientist.
Re:The start of the revolution... (Score:3, Informative)
Moon rocks (regolth) contain a trace amount of He3
Fixed that for you. The actual quantities are somewhere around 10 parts per billion.
Re:Look to see human exploration fans squirm... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The start of the revolution... (Score:3, Informative)
I sincerely hope your post was meant as a joke, but if not...
Removing the top 10 km of the entire lunar surface represents around 10^16 tons of material.
It also represents less than 2% of the total lunar mass.
In other words "large changes" isn't even in the timezone of what we're talking about....
Not 660 lbs, 300kg. (Score:5, Informative)
See, this is one of those places where we should discuss mass, not weight. Because it's not clear whether we're talking about robots which would weigh 660 pounds on earth or 660 pounds on the moon (which would be about 3960 pounds on Earth, quite a difference). The C-Net article (on which the PopSci article is based) took the information from a blog post [moriyama.com] from a Japanese Blog called Node. In that blog post, it says 300kg. The author of the C-Net article (Tim Hornyak) did the sloppy thing and just converted it to pounds without giving context. If you really want it in imperial units, the correct unit of mass is slugs. So the robots can be correctly described as being 300 kg, 20.56 slugs, or 660 pounds on Earth at sea-level.
Re:Just $2.2 Billion? (Score:1, Informative)
NASA sells regolith surrogate. It's not cheap, but you can try your designs a little closer to home.
Who's the nutcase now? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:and why, exactly? (Score:2, Informative)
Hello Johann Lau,
I think you are responding seriously to a post that was not meant to be taken seriously. In case you are not familiar with the phrase, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us [wikipedia.org]
for the reference behind the GP's humor.
Re:and why, exactly? (Score:2, Informative)