Comment Re:Apples and oranges. (Score 2) 248
Well, we have plenty of technologies for dealing with highly abrasive materials and operating in highly abrasive environments.
Take for instance the concrete pump, it's a device that moves a slurry of fine(and many times not so fine) particles at high rates of speed with a decent MTBF.
We have cars, trucks, and mining equipment that can operate with a decent MTBF in abrasive and sandy environments
We have helicopters that have to deal with operation in sand environments, where blades and other fast moving components essentially get sand blasted!
And there has been some recent work on lunar regolith tolerant connectors.
Now the bigger issue that we have isn't that the dust is abrasive, but that we can't model how the dust behaves! Granular materials like lunar regolith do not have scaling laws. Thus, we can't make small scale 'wind tunnel tests' on systems that handle granular materials, the only way to test is at full scale.
So when someone wants to build a new type of concrete plant, they test it out at near full scale and tweak it until it works, because we have no good way to computationally model it before hand. And even then, most concrete plants and other systems that handle granular materials do not work very well. They tend to experience jams and other problems which must be fixed with regular maintenance.
And we don't know why they jam or even in some cases why they work in the first place!
Thus we'd have trouble building a 'concrete plant' on the Moon without impractically large expenses, because we don't understand dust.