this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Robots, in particular mining equipment robots that everyone seems to be jazzed up about, they need maintenance. Earth bound mining equipment has minor service intervals of 250 hours of operation, major intervals every thousand hours, machine-stopping breakdowns occur on a bathtub curve but there would be a dozen or so before the first 4000 hours of operation.
For reference, 4000 hours of operation is less than half a year of 24/7 work.
Even with the addition of a few hundred million per machine in hardening and robustness, the environment they will work in is much, much worse than earth. Seals will need frequent replacement, the parts that do the digging need replacement, hoses will burst or leak, etc etc wtx.
On the moon you could (probably) laboriously tele-operate repair robots with the 2.5 second lag you'd have to Earth.
Mars? Not possible.
So I look at all these plans, where they'll send ice mining equipment to mars to run for two years unattended to make fuel and what-not, and with my 30 years of experience in the mining industry on earth, I just say, "that must be some good crack they're smoking".
Someone is going to have to go, just to repair and maintain all the machines.