Robotics
Send the Robots First
Why the road to Mars runs through the moon, and why the first lunar miners will never leave Earth
Everybody wants to go straight to Mars.
I understand the appeal. Mars is the prize. It has an atmosphere of sorts, it has water, it has a day almost the same length as ours, and it is the only place in this solar system where a human being could plausibly stand outside in a suit and imagine a future. The moon, by comparison, is a gray rock in our own backyard that we already visited fifty-odd years ago and then quit.
I still say we stop at the moon. And not for sentiment — for the same hard-nosed reason you build a lay-down yard before you build a plant.
Here is my argument, and it comes down to a second and a half.
The second and a half
Radio takes about a second and a quarter to reach the moon, so a round trip — you move your hand, the machine moves, you see it move — runs somewhere near two and a half seconds. That is sluggish. It is annoying. It is completely workable. Men have run remote equipment on worse lag than that in underwater work for decades.
Mars is four minutes each way when it is close, and better than twenty when it is far.1 You cannot operate a machine through that. You cannot catch a stall, you cannot feel a bit bind up, you cannot react to a wall coming down. Everything on Mars has to be autonomous, which means everything on Mars has to be smart enough to work without you.
So the moon is the only place in reach where a person on Earth can actually run a machine on another world in something close to real time.
That single fact is why I would go there first. Not to plant a flag. To put a workforce on the moon without putting a single human body in danger.
Avatars, not robots
When I say robots, I do not mean what most people picture. I am not talking about a clever machine that figures things out for itself. That is the hard problem, and every year somebody promises it and every year it stays five years out.
I am talking about avatars.
Picture a building here on Earth — put it in Houston, put it in Anchorage, I do not care. A man walks in at six in the morning with his coffee, same as he always has. He sits down, straps on a headset, and he is standing in a tunnel on the moon. He walks over to the foreman — who is also a man in a chair somewhere, in his own headset — and gets his assignment. We are drilling and blasting the north heading today. And off he goes.
His hands are here. His body is here. His eyes and his tools are a quarter million miles away.
There is nothing in that picture we do not already have. We have headsets. We have haptic feedback. We have hydraulic machinery that responds to a joystick, and mining crews that have been running remote loaders from surface control rooms for years now.2 The technology is not the leap. The arrangement is the leap.
And it means we do not have to invent a lunar workforce. We already have one. Every driller, every mechanic, every welder, every crane operator, every foreman who knows how to read a face of rock — all of that skill exists right now, in people who are alive today, and none of them have to pass a flight physical.
I have spent my career around those people. I would put a Slope crew in those chairs and back them against anybody.
Every trade goes up
This is the part I think gets missed when people talk about sending machines instead of people.
The usual version is a couple of clever rovers. That is not a work site. That is a science project.
A work site is a fleet, and the fleet has to mirror the trades. If we have it here, we need it there:
A drilling robot to advance the heading. A mucker to haul the broken rock out. A mechanic robot with real hands and a real tool set, because the drilling robot will break, and break often. A rigger. A welder. A machine that does nothing but haul, because half of construction is hauling. A supervisor unit with cameras high enough to see the whole face. And spares — crates and crates of spares, sitting on a shelf, because the mechanic's job is only useful if there is something to put on.
Every craft we have on Earth is a robot we need on the moon. That is the whole design philosophy in one sentence.
And the mechanic robot is the keystone. A fleet without one has a finite life — it works until the first bearing goes, then it degrades to scrap. A fleet with one is self-sustaining, because now the machines repair each other and the only thing you have to ship is parts. Parts are cheap and dense and they do not care how long the trip takes.
Lunar dust will earn its reputation, by the way. It is not sand — it has never been weathered, so every grain is a fresh broken edge, and it holds a static charge that makes it cling to everything.3 It will find seals and bearings and it will eat them. So the engineering that matters most is not the walking or the seeing. It is dust sealing, and it is designing every joint for a machine that can reach it with a wrench.
The word everybody wants to use
I know what the objection is, because it is the only thing anyone wants to talk about right now. Why bother with a man in a chair? Artificial intelligence is coming. Build machines that think, turn them loose, and let them get on with it while we sleep.
Maybe, someday. But I would not bet a base on it, and here is why.
A tunnel face does not behave like a spec sheet. Rock lies to you. Anybody who has spent time underground knows the feeling of something being wrong before he could tell you what — a change in the sound of the drill, dust coming out the wrong color, a rib that is weeping when it was dry yesterday. That is thirty years of pattern sitting behind a man's eyes, and it fires before he has words for it. I have watched good hands stop a job on a hunch and be right.
I do not know how to put that in a machine. Nobody else does either, whatever they are claiming this quarter.
So my answer is not to pick a side. It is to divide the work honestly. Let autonomy have the dumb, repetitive, bounded jobs — hauling a load from point A to point B, running a survey grid, holding a light. That work is genuinely better done by a machine that never gets bored, and the lag does not matter because nothing is deciding anything. Then put a human in the loop everywhere a wrong call brings a roof down or scraps a machine you cannot replace.
There is a second reason, and it has nothing to do with capability.
An autonomous machine answers to whoever programmed it. A teleoperated machine answers to the man holding the controls, and that man has a name, a boss, a license, and a conscience. When something goes wrong — and something always goes wrong — there is a person who has to look at it and account for it. That is not a limitation of the design. That is the best feature it has.
And while everybody is racing to build machines that walk around and decide things without being told, it is worth looking honestly at what some of those machines are being built for. You have seen the videos. There are programs in more than one country putting real money into humanoid machines whose obvious purpose is to fight, and they are not shy about it. I am not going to name anybody. I do not have to. It is the same technology either way — the same actuators, the same vision systems, the same control loops.
What differs is the intention behind it, and that is a choice we get to make out in the open.
Some are building machines to fight over this planet. I am proposing machines that build us another one. Same parts. Opposite direction.
What they build
They build down.
Not because it is romantic, but because the surface of the moon is a bad place to keep a person. There is no atmosphere and no magnetic field, so radiation arrives with nothing in the way, and a solar storm is a genuine emergency. Micrometeorites come in constantly. Surface temperature swings hundreds of degrees between day and night.
Put ten or twenty feet of rock over your head and every one of those problems softens at once. Radiation drops off hard. Meteorites stop mattering. And the temperature stops swinging entirely, because rock is a fine insulator — the same reason a root cellar in Alaska holds steady while it is forty below outside.
My father was a miner, and he wanted to tunnel into a mountain and build a greenhouse in it. He was right about the physics on Earth, and he is even more right on the moon.
So the robots drill and blast their way into a mountainside, muck out the rock, and open a room. They line it, they seal it, they set up an airlock. All of it done by machines run by people who go home to their families every night.
And the rock they muck out is not waste. Lunar regolith is roughly forty percent oxygen by weight, locked up in oxides.4 Heat it hot enough — and one way to get that heat is concentrated sunlight off mirrors, which costs you nothing but the mirrors — and you can drive the oxygen off and capture it. What is left over is metal. Iron, aluminum, titanium, in the very place you are trying to build things.
So the same operation that digs your shelter also makes your air and your structural stock. That is not a coincidence. That is what makes it a base instead of a camp.
And then the people come
Only after all of that is done does anybody get on a rocket.
They arrive at a place that already has pressure, power, air, a shop, and a machine fleet waiting. They are not pioneers scratching a hole in the ground while their oxygen clock runs. They are the second shift, walking into a site that has already been built out.
That is how we do it in construction and it is the only way it has ever worked. Nobody sends the operators before the site work is done.
And when it comes time for Mars, we will not be guessing. We will have already learned how to seal against abrasive dust, how to build machines that fix machines, how to pull oxygen out of rock, how to line a tunnel and hold pressure in it — all of it learned two and a half seconds away, where a bad day costs you a machine instead of a crew.
The moon is not a detour on the way to Mars. It is the shop where we build the tools that make Mars survivable.
And we will have built it with machines that never once decided anything on their own. Machines with a working man's hands on them the entire way up.
Send the machines first. The people can wait until it is ready for them.
From one explorer to another, we appreciate you reading this far. We are excited about what this endeavor brings, and we would like you along for the rest of it.
Come join us. Because we are Star Bound.
John LangEditor
Ideas in Star Bound are published open — take them, build them better. Our open proposal.
A note on where this comes from. I am not a metallurgist, a spacecraft engineer, or a degreed engineer of any kind. But I am a practical one, with more than forty years in heavy industrial construction: welding, millwright work, hydraulics, mining, and thirty-three years of electrical construction and commissioning on the North Slope of Alaska, in a place that punishes anything built wrong. Much of that time I have worked as a field engineer, which means I am the one standing in front of the equipment when the drawing turns out to be wrong, and the fix has to be made on the spot, with what is on hand, and has to work the first time. Anyone who has done that long enough learns that a lot of engineering gets corrected in the field by people with more experience than the people who drew it. That is the eye I bring to these subjects: not what should work on paper, but what actually gets built, and what breaks. The facts I take from other people are footnoted so you can check them and read further. The ideas built on top of those facts are my own, and I would rather see them knocked down by somebody who knows better than left standing because nobody looked.
Sources
- NASA, Aquanauts experience communication delays (NEEMO 21) — four to 24 minutes one way to Mars depending on where the planets sit; ESA, Spacecraft event time vs. Earth receive time. The moon figure is straight arithmetic: about 240,000 miles at the speed of light. ↩
- Rio Tinto’s Perth Operations Centre has run driverless haul trucks, drills, and trains in the Pilbara from roughly 1,500 km away since 2010; see AIST, Rio Tinto Launches its Operations Centre, and CIM Magazine, Two Australian mines move to all-driverless truck fleet. ↩
- NASA Kennedy, Electrostatic Characterization of Lunar Dust (NTRS) — NASA has ranked dust among the top two problems to solve before returning to the moon; the Apollo 17 crew reported it wearing through suit layers and jamming joints. ↩
- The oxygen content of lunar regolith is a standard figure in lunar geology references and in NASA in-situ resource utilization literature. ↩
The radiation, micrometeorite, and temperature-swing hazards of the lunar surface are textbook and are not footnoted individually. The fleet list and the avatar arrangement are my own proposal.
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