robotic exploration, automated (Score 5, Interesting)

Seven years ago, I remember reading an article in Popular Mechanics (the article's long gone, unfortunately) about an idea for a completely autonomous robotic system to explore and develop space.

The plan was to construct a simple network of small mining robots that ran on tracks that they themselves laid down. Minerals mined would initially go to the construction of more tracks, track-riding robots, micro-smelters, and power sources (solar or otherwise). In this way, you could construct a self-sufficient mining operation with minimal initial investment that would grow at an almost exponential rate, given sufficient local resources. Land on an asteroid, send minerals and metals out of it a year or two later - avoid the gravity well entirely.

At the time, though, it was just an idea and we didn't have the tech to pull it off. You need some relatively sophisticated AI decision techniques to deal with the nitty-gritty details of such an operation, as we're finding from even such comparatively simple things as the mars rovers today, and it's hard to reproduce the robot-critters on the spot. It's for reasons like the first, though, that I originally got interested in CS and majored in it, and I think we're getting close. Depending on this Hubble work and similar projects, robotics may have finally caught up too.

Instead of worrying about how to get the materials into orbit to build in space, we should start using what's already there. Here's to hoping.