
Audi's improbable project to put a rover on the moon - coloneltcb
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/11/10746926/audi-lunar-rover-xprize-detroit-auto-show-2016?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
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jk4930
I work for the team Part Time Scientists. AMA.

There's an older post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9916217)

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raus22
How large/heavy is the rover?

What is the plan for getting it up and land it on the moon?

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jk4930
Around 100x80x50 cm. Between 30-40 kg (depending on payload).

The plan: Rover into the landing module (LM), LM into the rocket, rocket
brings us to the right orbit where it releases the LM, from there to the Moon,
soft landing.

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chfjfuchdjd
Automated remote synthesis and production of mechanical parts from regolith
has the potential to be absolutely huge. Most the problems with establishing
human colonies beyond earth are that they require the astronauts to either
bring their shelter with them or construct it while living out of a
rudimentary temporary shelter. With this, a team of rovers could be sent in
advance to build machines, living spaces, and other equipment that's already
in place for when the astronauts arrive. It also solves concerns about
radiation exposure since the rovers could potentially construct a
buried/underground living structure.

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Faint
Go PTS! :)

And I feel for you chfjfuchdjd, I started writing a response and noticed that
I'm writing basically same thing you did, but anyway:

The most important thing is _industrialization_ , using resources already in
space (moon and NEOs), independent as possible from things lifted from earth.
It sounds a far off goal to - for example - plaster moon with solar panels,
but there's no physical reason why it couldn't be done, mostly automatically,
with very small input of materials from earth.

"Want to go live to moon? There's nothing there but vacuum, wasteland and
radiation, and you need to take everything with you, at costs of 1.2M$/kg.
Nice view of stars.", doesn't make much sense, does it. Try this: "Want to go
live to the moon? You'll have 40B$/day of free electricity [1] and absolutely
massive, if still somewhat one-sided manufacturing capability to use. Build
anything you like (including a garden, just bring the soil and seeds with
you). Yeah, it costs 1.2M$/kg to get there, but you'll have a big underground
shelter and free oxygen for kickers. Nice view of night sky, btw.". There, now
it's suddenly making a lot more sense!

The problem is not that there would be some single insurmountable technical
challenge stopping us, there just there isn't an agency or program whose
purpose would be to attack the huge number of those technical challenges
needed to overcome. Like, how do you build magnets for electrical motors
without plastic or carbon for wire insulation?

Maybe you could find formulation of glass to coat wire with. Maybe you could
deposit alternating layers of conductor and glass directly to core to make
magnets. Maybe you could 3D-print the wires directly inside the insulator. Or
something completely different. It could take better part of decade to find
out and scale, and perfect the process down to a T. And the end result would
be something onerous and expensive to manufacture in earth (where's my vacuum
for that vacuum deposition step?), and probably somewhat less efficient than
we can muster with earthy materials. It doesn't matter, it could still work
brilliantly on moon. But it's quite unlikely that such a technology would be
an offshoot of some other R&D project here on earth, or an offshoot of some
space science project. None care about the poor plastic-free magnet wire.

There are some really interesting projects in NASA, for developing ISRU, and
say nuclear power (could be handy for bootstrapping moon base), but these
never seem to be the ones that literally fly. At least for an outside punter
(correct me if I'm wrong) they seem to be just a side dish, not part of
concerted effort/vision to develop technological base for manufacturing. What
flies seem to be science probes (good!) that can also take nice pictures (a
bonus), and ISS.

Which brings me to humans in space. It seems a huge waste to haul people to
LEO, and then support them there for decades for great expense, and hope that
will somehow help the march of civilization to space. You need a _reason_
first for those people to be there. You need to extract energy and material
from the _environment_ , and _create useful and interesting things_ with them,
because that's what life does, both pooping humans, and clanking machines
(together what I'll call civilization). What proportion of space civilization
should be humans, and what proportion machines, should be strictly rational
affair, you lift as many people as is optimal for economic growth at that
moment. I would not worry, as long as machines need humans at all, it's
probably useful at some point to have some people nearby to troubleshoot
processes gone awry, do R&D, or just hang around at spa, even if life support
is expensive. If humans actually become redundant, we will probably become
redundant some point on earth too, anyway.

tl;dr: Self replicating solar power industry on moon - build it, and they will
come.

[1] Roughly the amount of electricity that 200km wide strip of solar panels
around moon equator would produce at 0.04$/kWh and paltry 4.3% efficiency,
possible with even crudest of processes.

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usrusr
Nice to see Audi try something different for publicity than just ever more
aggressive headlight designs.

The players have changed, but space seems to be just as much publicity driven
today as it was in the original space race.

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EC1
> but space seems to be just as much publicity driven today as it was in the
> original space race.

Marketing and advertising makes things seem ways they aren't.

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dexwiz
This is marketing for design, not engineering. Audi will not put a rover on
the moon in 50 years. None of their statements are novel. Sending printers to
somewhere to make robots is probably an idea that most engineers already know.
The mock up itself is just a basic model with X-Prize on the side and an Audi
hood ornament. Remember Lexus's hoverboard? It was not a hoverboard, its was
great advertisement for their style. This is also just an ad.

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namuol
I believe it's called "sponsorship".

Audi is funding Part Time Scientists
([http://ptscientists.com/](http://ptscientists.com/)), a team headed in part
by NASA engineer Jack Crenshaw ([http://jackcrenshaw.com/work/me-and-
nasa/](http://jackcrenshaw.com/work/me-and-nasa/)), who worked on lunar
trajectory calculations for the Apollo missions.

The PT team has already received milestone awards from the X Prize foundation
for rover development and optical systems:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize#Terrestri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize#Terrestrial_Milestone_Prizes)

The hard part of this mission, of course, is getting to the moon. This team is
just working on the rover and its mission once it lands.

You're probably right that they wont make it to the moon, but the purpose of
the X Prize Foundation is to stimulate commercial interest in emerging fields
and industries. Sounds to me like it's working.

