As excited as I am that we're automating construction, glancing around at these comments I'm realizing any self-sustaining moon base is still many decades or even centuries out. The excitement to skepticism ratio seems... extremely naive.

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grues-dinner 6 days ago | parent [-]

> self-sustaining moon base

The advantage of the moon is that it doesn't have to be entirely self-sustaining - chucking a few hundred tonnes of "vitamins" (as Greg Bear called them in Eon) like microchips, food and so on over on a Starship or other ultraheavy rocket may go a long way.

The real question will be what the lunar colony is even for. It's unlikely a lunar colony is economically sustainable if it doesn't do anything. Research only needs a fairly small crew and no self-sustaining expectation, just as in Antarctica. Same for a bragging-rights flag-planting base. If it provides a low-delta-v staging site and a supply of aluminium, iron, fuel and (looking a bit iffy these days) water supply, it may make sense as a shipyard. Or an He3 mine, if (big if) that's useful for fusion. None of these things promise quick payback.

> excitement to skepticism ratio seems... extremely naive.

I don't think anyone is really expecting anything major to happen any time soon. It's just more fun to think about than grey AIs taking grey jobs writing grey web frameworks for writing grey apps to shovel grey adverts for grey products to people who have grey jobs selling grey consulting services to the grey companies selling the AI

	▲	Cthulhu_ 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		A first moon base will be much like the ISS; dependent on earth for most supplies, primarily used for R&D, maybe eventually for some tourism. But whether there's anything after that will... probably depend on the outcome of the experiments on that base, including the viability of extracting and converting resources. If it turns out that e.g. producing He3 is prohibitively expensive or unfeasible, it may be the first and last one. The ISS doesn't have a successor and it's going to be decommissioned at some point in the future. Only China has another inhabited space station. I don't believe there's any serious plans for another space station at the moment.