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.

The solar proton flux is really, really, really, really low, even during a solar flare! We're talking 10s of protons per square centimeter at best here.

That is not a lot of water. 600 million cubic meters is roughly the volume of Sydney harbor. In human terms, this is certainly quite a bit of water, however, this water is spread out over a very large area. This makes getting sufficient amounts of water difficult, especially in cold, shadowed craters(no solar power!).

The Moon has no resources we don't have on Earth, however, it has them 'cheaper.'

Building a large structure in space like an orbital resort or a solar power satellite from materials sent from Earth would be impractically expensive. However, if one gets this material from the Moon, these sorts of structures become a lot more practical.

It is a lot less energetically intensive to launch a kilogram of something from the Moon(hard vacuum, low gravity) than it is to launch a kilogram of something from the Earth(air, high gravity). Just compare the Apollo Lunar Lander to a Proton rocket bound for the International Space Station.

Now as for mining the Moon as opposed to asteroids:
1. asteroids are typically quite a bit farther out than the Moon
2. the lunar environment is fairly well characterized: we have 382 kg of near pristine samples of lunar material, while we have only micrograms of samples of asteroidal material.
3.we know how to mine stuff in gravity, we currently do not know how to mine stuff in microgravity

Only problem is that the Moon lacks large amounts of water and carrying said water to the Moon would be energetically costly.

Making something dust tight in a vacuum environment can't be all that hard. We have standards for preventing dust intrusion and they aren't all that different from standards for preventing water intrusion.

And we do have a way to clean dust off equipment in a hard vacuum. Moon dust easily picks up an electrostatic charge, allowing one to use an alternating electric field to remove regolith from solar panels.

The same technology, shouldn't be all that hard to integrate into space suits or other equipment.

Robonaut's legs are designed for walking around the space station in microgravity, so they would be useless in gravity

BUT, the same people working on robonaut are building a female humanoid robot for the DARPA robotics challenge, which could very well walk on the moon

Robonaut's legs are designed for walking around the space station in microgravity, so they would be useless in gravity

BUT, the same people working on robonaut are building a female humanoid robot for the DARPA robotics challenge, which could very well walk on the moon

Except that hydrogen can do some [a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_damage#Shatter_cracks.2C_flakes.2C_fish-eyes_and_micro_perforations"]rather nasty things to metals[/a].

Although, hard drives don't get very hot or experience high stresses, so it might not effect it.

Except the part in the video where they have it go in a constant direction in a forest using on board magnetometers.

Perhaps this could be used to figure out exactly how deadly limnic eruptions are triggered.

Given that the average body weight in the United States is 164 pounds and we have 6 passengers, we have an added weight of 984 pounds. Less than the 1200 pounds saved. This does not take into account the weight of luggage however.

Now ideally one would have the passengers pay according to their weight at takeoff, but I'm sure many people would find this unacceptable.

There is no such thing as negligible weight on an aircraft.

Indeed there is quite a bit of variance in vegetables and meat, but judgement to choose the right approach to cook is not the hard part, we have AI approaches that can deal with this. While one may not be able to have a robot autonomously generate new menu items, it should be possible for a robot to cook menu items and make them tasty despite variance.

However, we don't have good enough manipulation approaches for doing the actual cooking. We can easily teach a robot that tomatoes go good with basil, but we don't know how to teach a robot to pick up a tomato and slice it(at least without programming specific to the task of slicing tomatoes). This is mainly due to the fact that we don't know how we pick up a tomato or slice it, because much of what happens when we do so is unconscious.

Dealing with soft objects is currently a big problem in robotics, once it's solved there will be very few manual jobs that won't be doable by robots.

Actually, part of the reasons for the Japanese making humanoid robots are:
1. Humanoid robots are good for advertising because people think they are cool and they're good for showing off technology made by a particular company.
2. Japanese companies own a pretty big share of the industrial robotics market, not only that, they tend to be pretty forward thinking. So you'd better believe that they're trying to crack the robotic worker problem.
3. A lot of Japanese engineers grew up watching Astroboy.

Now, I'm willing to bet that the Japanese will have a humanoid robot carry the Olympic torch, and not only that, I'll bet they're gonna have it run with the torch.

The interesting thing is, we will probably replace the Grade-A-B gourmet chefs first.

Automation does not make sense for a place like Mcdonalds today. Currently, the product Mcdonalds makes is cheap and the people making that product are cheap, so one would lose money automating Mcdonalds.

But, in automating one can produce higher quality products that one can sell for a higher price and actually pay off the automation. So it makes more sense to highly skilled, high paid workers like the Grade A-B chefs.

This has happened before, CNC machines were initially used to replace highly skilled machinists and robot welders were initially used to replace highly skilled welders.