Speaker 1: Welcome to the Sentient Code, where intelligence is engineered, autonomy
Speaker 1: is emerging, and a line between human and machine grows thinner.
Speaker 1: Each episode, we decode the algorithms, explore the robotics, and
Speaker 1: examine the ideas shaping the future of artificial minds.
Speaker 2: I want to start this deep dive by asking you
Speaker 2: to visualize something. It's an image that I think really
Speaker 2: defines our generation's relationship with space, even if we don't
Speaker 2: always realize it. You've definitely seen it.
Speaker 3: I think I know the one you mean.
Speaker 2: It's probably on your phone, you know, scrolling through a
Speaker 2: news feed, a high definition photo from the surface of Mars.
Speaker 3: The rust colored planes exactly.
Speaker 2: You see this flat, dusty expands and it just stretches
Speaker 2: out forever. And there are these like sharp, jagged rocks
Speaker 2: scattered all over.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they look like they haven't moved in a
Speaker 3: billion years, not an inch.
Speaker 2: And the horizon it curves just a little too much.
Speaker 2: It's kind of unsettling. It just it immediately reminds you
Speaker 2: that you are not on Earth.
Speaker 3: It creates a very specific feeling, doesn't it. It's it's beautiful,
Speaker 3: but it's a haunting kind of beauty. It's profoundly empty.
Speaker 2: It is. But when I was looking at the research
Speaker 2: for today, I started thinking about the context of that photo. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it's just terrifyingly lonely. There's this profound silence to it.
Speaker 2: And I don't just mean an acoustic silence, because you know,
Speaker 2: obviously the atmosphere is thin, but I mean the silence of.
Speaker 3: Distance, right, the time it takes for that image to
Speaker 3: even get to us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean when you look at that picture, you
Speaker 2: have to realize that the radio signal carrying and all
Speaker 2: those pixels took well anywhere from three to twenty minutes
Speaker 2: just to cross the vacuum to get to Earth.
Speaker 3: Right. It's not a live feed.
Speaker 2: Not even close.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: By the time you see that rock on your screen,
Speaker 2: the rover that took the picture has already moved on
Speaker 2: or gone to sleep.
Speaker 3: Or driven off a cliff hypothetically.
Speaker 2: Well, let's hope not. But the thing that really hits me,
Speaker 2: and this is the key, is that no human eye
Speaker 2: has ever seen that scene, not directly. We are only
Speaker 2: seeing it because a machine went first. We are seeing
Speaker 2: it through the eyes of a robot.
Speaker 3: And that is the fundamental truth of the entire space age.
Speaker 2: Isn't it.
Speaker 3: I mean, we have this very romanticized view of space explosion.
Speaker 3: We think of Neil Armstrong, we think of the Martian
Speaker 3: boots on the ground.
Speaker 2: Sure, those are the big moments.
Speaker 3: And rightfully so, those are the headlines. But if you
Speaker 3: actually look at the history the real story, robots have
Speaker 3: always been the advance guard. They are the scouts. They
Speaker 3: mapped the Moon before Armstrong ever set foot on it.
Speaker 2: They descended into the absolute hellscape of Venus.
Speaker 3: So we didn't have to, right They melted, so we
Speaker 3: didn't have to. They've orbited every single planet in our
Speaker 3: Solar system.
Speaker 2: They've been the busy ones. Okay, but here is the shift,
Speaker 2: and this is really what we're digging into today. For
Speaker 2: the last sixty seventy years, these robots have essentially been tourists,
Speaker 2: very expensive, very smart toy riss with PhDs. Exactly, they went,
Speaker 2: they looked, they measured, They've took some amazing selfies, and
Speaker 2: they sent back all this data. They were passive observers, right.
Speaker 2: But looking at the stack of sources for today, it
Speaker 2: seems like that entire relationship is fundamentally changing.
Speaker 3: It is we are in a transition era. Okay, how
Speaker 3: so the paradigm is shifting from robots as scouts to
Speaker 3: robots as builders. We aren't just sending them to look
Speaker 3: at the frontier anymore. We're sending them to well to
Speaker 3: construct the frontier.
Speaker 2: They build the actual infrastructure that allows us to stay.
Speaker 3: There, precisely because here's the hard reality. Space is dangerous,
Speaker 3: it's incredibly distant, and it is obscenely expensive. Humans simply
Speaker 3: cannot go, not for a long time, not sustainably, until
Speaker 3: that infrastructure exists.
Speaker 2: And since we can't be there to build.
Speaker 3: It because there's no life support yet, right, the robots
Speaker 3: have to do it for us.
Speaker 2: So today we are doing a deep dive into the
Speaker 2: robotic architects of the lunar Frontier. We're going to look
Speaker 2: at the history of how we got here, which is
Speaker 2: frankly wilder than I thought, the insane engineering challenges of
Speaker 2: building on the moon, and what this robotic revolution actually
Speaker 2: looks like.
Speaker 3: And I can give you a spoiler alert go on.
Speaker 3: The biggest enemy isn't aliens, it's dust.
Speaker 2: The dust is absolutely the villain of this story. I
Speaker 2: was floored by that.
Speaker 3: It's the number one problem.
Speaker 2: But before we get to the villain, let's talk about
Speaker 2: the setting. We're talking about the Moon today. Okay, but
Speaker 2: why I feel like Mars gets all the cultural hype.
Speaker 2: Elon wants to go to Mars, NASA wants to go
Speaker 2: to Mars. Why are we focusing back on the moon.
Speaker 3: Mars is the dream, Sure, it's the horizon goal, but
Speaker 3: the Moon is the test site. It is the necessary
Speaker 3: testing ground for humanity's first off world construction efforts. So
Speaker 3: if we can't make it work, if we can't make
Speaker 3: the robots work there just three days away, we have
Speaker 3: absolutely no chance of making them work on Mars, which
Speaker 3: is a six month journey at best.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's the sandbox, it's the proving ground exactly.
Speaker 2: Let's rewind a bit though. You mentioned this history of
Speaker 2: robots as the advance guard. I think most people know
Speaker 2: about the Mars rous spirit and opportunity and all that,
Speaker 2: But looking at the history here, it seems like we've
Speaker 2: forgotten about a whole era of robotic exploration that really
Speaker 2: set the stage for all of this we have.
Speaker 3: It goes back to the very beginning of the space race.
Speaker 3: If we look at the lunar surface, the first things
Speaker 3: to touch it weren't American boots. They were metal landing legs.
Speaker 3: You had the Soviet lunar program in nineteen sixty six
Speaker 3: and then the American Surveyor won that same year.
Speaker 2: And reading about these early landers, they weren't exactly sophisticated,
Speaker 2: were they. I mean, compared to what we have now,
Speaker 2: they seem like, I don't know, ten cans.
Speaker 3: They were primitive, but they were brave. They were static landers.
Speaker 3: That's the key. They couldn't move, they could barely act.
Speaker 3: Their entire mission was just to answer the most basic,
Speaker 3: almost primal question imaginable, which was if we land something here,
Speaker 3: will it sink?
Speaker 2: I remember reading about that. There was a genuine scientific
Speaker 2: fear that the moon dust the regolith was so deep
Speaker 2: and so fluffy that a lander would just.
Speaker 3: Be swallowed, like landing in quicksand exactly, and it was
Speaker 3: a real theory. Some very respected astronomers thought the dust
Speaker 3: could be meters thick. So these robots, Surveyor and Luna,
Speaker 3: they were basically sacrificial lambs. Their only job was to land, survive,
Speaker 3: and send back a signal saying hey, I'm still on.
Speaker 2: The surface, And in doing that they proved the ground
Speaker 2: was solid.
Speaker 3: They prepared the ground literally for human footsteps.
Speaker 2: So they were the confirmers step one. The floor is.
Speaker 3: Real, exactly, but the real leap, the moment we moved
Speaker 3: from just landing and surviving to actually exploring, came in
Speaker 3: the early seventies, and this is a chapter of history
Speaker 3: that often gets completely overshadowed by Apollo, the Lino CODs,
Speaker 3: Luna CODs, the Soviet rovers.
Speaker 2: I was looking at pictures of these things. They look steampunk,
Speaker 2: is that the right word?
Speaker 3: They are wonderfully Soviet in their design. The best way
Speaker 3: to describe them is to imagine a bath tub on
Speaker 3: eight wheels.
Speaker 2: A bath tub.
Speaker 3: Literally, it was a pressurized tub to keep the electronics
Speaker 3: at a reasonable temperature, covered in a lid that would
Speaker 3: open up like a clamshell during the day to expose solar.
Speaker 2: Panels, and then close at night to stay warm.
Speaker 3: Right, to keep the heat in during that two week
Speaker 3: long night. A solar powered, remote controlled bathtub on wheels.
Speaker 2: That's effectively what it was. But here's the kicker, and
Speaker 2: this connects directly to the challenges we're facing today. These
Speaker 2: things were driven by teams on Earth in almost real time.
Speaker 3: Like a remote control car, a really expensive one, a
Speaker 3: very slow incredibly high stakes remote control car. You had
Speaker 3: a team of five controllers sitting in a command center
Speaker 3: in the Soviet Union. You had a driver, a navigator,
Speaker 3: and engineer, and they were looking at these grainy, black
Speaker 3: and white television images that updated maybe every few seconds, so.
Speaker 2: Not exactly a smooth video feed. What about the delay?
Speaker 3: The round trip signal delay to the moon is about
Speaker 3: two point six seconds.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that's noticeable.
Speaker 3: It's very noticeable. You push the joystick forward and for
Speaker 3: almost three seconds absolutely nothing happens. Then you see the
Speaker 3: image change.
Speaker 2: Maybe that sounds incredibly stressful. You'd have to be so careful.
Speaker 3: It was white knuckle driving, they said. If they saw
Speaker 3: a crater in the image that was right in front
Speaker 3: of them, it was already too late to stop. If
Speaker 3: they were moving at any kind of speed. Oh, they
Speaker 3: had to drive in these tiny short bursts. Drive stop, look,
Speaker 3: wait for the new image. Drive again. And despite that,
Speaker 3: I mean, despite that incredibly crude technology, they were remarkably successful.
Speaker 2: How successful.
Speaker 3: Lunicod too covered nearly forty kilometers in just four months.
Speaker 2: Forty kilometers. Wait a minute, I checked the stats on
Speaker 2: the modern Mars rovers opportunity, the famous one it took
Speaker 2: years to cover a marathon distance, which is about forty
Speaker 2: two kilometers it did, and Lunicod did almost that in
Speaker 2: four months. Yeah, how is that possible?
Speaker 3: Because it had a human brain in the loop. Even
Speaker 3: if that brain was a quarter of a million miles away,
Speaker 3: it was still a human making judgments. It could make
Speaker 3: decisions slowly, but it could navigate complex terrain. It proved
Speaker 3: for the first time that a robot could be a
Speaker 3: useful exploring tool traversing unprepared ground under human direction.
Speaker 2: So that was the high water mark for a while.
Speaker 2: And then obviously we had Apollo.
Speaker 3: We did, but there's a paradox with Apollo that we
Speaker 3: need to unpack. We remember the humans, Armstrong, Aldrin Sernin,
Speaker 3: we picture them, but Apollo was critically reliant on robotic precursors.
Speaker 2: You mean to find the landing spots.
Speaker 3: The Ranger program, the Surveyor program, the lunar orbiters, they
Speaker 3: mapped the entire surface in minute detail. They were looking
Speaker 3: for flat, safe, boring places to land. Without those robotic maps,
Speaker 3: the lunar module pilots would have been flying completely blind.
Speaker 2: So even in our greatest human achievement in space, the
Speaker 2: robots paved the way always. But then after Apollo, humans
Speaker 2: just stopped going. The funding dried up, the political will vanished.
Speaker 3: Humans stopped going, but the robots didn't. In fact, that's
Speaker 3: when we entered what you could call the golden age
Speaker 3: of robotic science. The post Apollo era was almost entirely robotic, right.
Speaker 2: That's when we sent Vulking to Mars to look for life.
Speaker 3: We sent Voyager to the outer planets on its grand tour,
Speaker 3: Galileo to Jupiter, Cassini to Saturn.
Speaker 2: This was the era where robots became our primary eyes
Speaker 2: and ears in the Solar System. We basically accepted that
Speaker 2: for a while we weren't leaving low Worth orbit, so
Speaker 2: we sent our machines as our proxies exactly.
Speaker 3: And while all those orbiters were doing amazing work, the
Speaker 3: surface technology was quietly evolving, specifically for Mars. And this
Speaker 3: is crucial for understanding where we're going next with these
Speaker 3: architects on the Moon. How so, the Mars rovers forced
Speaker 3: us to solve a problem that Lunocod, with its backtob
Speaker 3: on wheels didn't really have to deal.
Speaker 2: With the distance, the time delay, the time delay.
Speaker 3: This is the great driver of innovation in robotics. Remember
Speaker 3: the lunar cuts two point six seconds. Annoying but manageable.
Speaker 3: You can deal with a bad zoom call.
Speaker 2: But Mars is what ten twenty minutes away?
Speaker 3: It varies depending on where the planets are in their orbits.
Speaker 3: A signal to Mars can take anywhere from three to
Speaker 3: twenty two minutes, so a round trip could be almost
Speaker 3: forty five minutes.
Speaker 2: You can't joystick a Mars rover. It's physically impossible, completely impossible.
Speaker 3: If you see a cliff approaching on your video feed
Speaker 3: and you slam on the brakes, the rover actually fell
Speaker 3: off that cliff twenty minutes ago.
Speaker 2: That is a terrifying thought. Yes, you can't drive it.
Speaker 2: You have to tell it where to go.
Speaker 3: You have to give it goals. And this necessity forced
Speaker 3: the development of autonomy. It started small with Sojourner in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 2: The little microwave sized one, the cute one.
Speaker 3: The cute one. It couldn't do much, but it had
Speaker 3: a basic refuse to die instinct. You know, if it's
Speaker 3: tilt sensorfelt it was tipping too far, it would just stop.
Speaker 3: It was a baby step, but.
Speaker 2: A crucial one.
Speaker 3: Then you had the huge leap with Spirit and Opportunity
Speaker 3: in two thousand and four. They were true robot geologists,
Speaker 3: and they completely transformed our understanding of Martian history and water.
Speaker 3: And then the Big Ones Curiosity in twenty twelve and
Speaker 3: Perseverance in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: One, and Perseverance even carried a helicopter Ingenuity, the first
Speaker 2: powered controlled flight on another world, a true Right Brothers moment.
Speaker 3: But the key takeaway here isn't just the amazing hardware.
Speaker 3: It's the software. It's the brain, the otomy. Over these decades,
Speaker 3: NASA and JPL developed incredibly sophisticated autonomous driving, things like
Speaker 3: hazard avoidance, pathfinding, visual odometry, where the rover tracks its
Speaker 3: position by watching the landscape move.
Speaker 2: So the robots learned to think for themselves, at least
Speaker 2: geographically speaking.
Speaker 3: They learned to look at a field of rocks and say, okay,
Speaker 3: I can't go that way. That's dangerous. I'll plot a
Speaker 3: course around to the left without asking a human for permission.
Speaker 2: First, because they had to. If they waited for permission
Speaker 2: for every single meter of driving, they'd never get anywhere exactly.
Speaker 3: And now this is the punchline. We are taking all
Speaker 3: that hard won expertise, that autonomy that was born from
Speaker 3: the isolation of Mars, and we are bringing it back home,
Speaker 3: so to speak, back.
Speaker 2: To the Moon, but for a totally different jobs.
Speaker 3: We're a totally different job. We aren't just driving around
Speaker 3: looking at rocks anymore. We're going there to build a base.
Speaker 2: Okay, So that sets the stage perfectly. We've got the history,
Speaker 2: We've got the tech evolution from a remote control bathtub
Speaker 2: to a self driving, nuclear powered science lab. But I
Speaker 2: want to circle back to the why you said the
Speaker 2: Moon is the testing ground. But from a resources perspective, Honestly,
Speaker 2: I look at the Moon and I see a dead,
Speaker 2: dry rock. Why are we building infrastructure there? What is
Speaker 2: there to mind that makes it all worthwhile?
Speaker 3: This is the part that usually surprises people. We tend
Speaker 3: to think of the Moon as just I don't know,
Speaker 3: a source of rock for concrete or something. But the
Speaker 3: real treasure, the strategic resource that changes the economics of
Speaker 3: the entire Solar system is water.
Speaker 2: Water on the Moon. I'm talking about ice, right, like
Speaker 2: liquid oceans.
Speaker 3: Right water ice specifically, it's trapped in the regolith, in
Speaker 3: the soil inside permanently shadowed craters at the.
Speaker 2: Poles permanently shadowed, so places the sun has never reached.
Speaker 3: Exactly deep craters near the North and South Poles, where
Speaker 3: the angle of sunlight is so low that the bottom
Speaker 3: of the crater has been in total darkness and for
Speaker 3: unimaginably cold for maybe billions of years.
Speaker 2: And how do we know it's there? I mean we
Speaker 2: actually like drilled and found it.
Speaker 3: Not yet, but we have very strong evidence. Missions like
Speaker 3: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and India's Chandra in one have
Speaker 3: used instruments that detected hydrogen signatures. Where there's hydrogen in
Speaker 3: that kind of concentration, it strongly suggests water.
Speaker 2: Ice. Okay, so there's ice, but what's the what I mean,
Speaker 2: is it just for astronauts to drink.
Speaker 3: That's part of it, for sure, But the so what
Speaker 3: here is massive? It's not about drinking water. Is H
Speaker 3: two O hydrogen and.
Speaker 2: Oxygen, which it's rocket fuel.
Speaker 3: It is the most efficient chemical rocket propellant. We have
Speaker 3: liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the same stuff that powered
Speaker 3: the Space Shuttle. If you can mine that ice, melt it,
Speaker 3: purify it, and then split it with electrolysis, you have
Speaker 3: a gas station in orbit.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this because I feel like this is
Speaker 2: a point that gets glossed over a lot, but it
Speaker 2: sounds like it's the entire reason for this new push.
Speaker 2: Why is a gas station on the Moon such a
Speaker 2: big deal. We have plenty of water here. Can't we
Speaker 2: just bring fuel from Earth?
Speaker 3: We can, and we do, but you have to fight
Speaker 3: Earth's gravity well to get it up there. This is
Speaker 3: the single biggest problem in space travel.
Speaker 2: Explain that the gravity, well.
Speaker 3: Think of Earth's gravity like a really really deep pit.
Speaker 3: To get anything out of that pit, a satellite, an astronaut,
Speaker 3: a liter of water, you have to burn a colossal
Speaker 3: amount of fuel just to lift it. It costs thousands
Speaker 3: upon thousands of dollars per kilogram to launch anything to
Speaker 3: the Moon.
Speaker 2: So if you're launching a tank or full of fuel
Speaker 2: to the Moon, a huge portion of the fuel in
Speaker 2: the rocket blow it is just there to lift the
Speaker 2: fuel above it.
Speaker 3: Exactly. It's this vicious cycle called the tyranny of the
Speaker 3: rocket equation. The more you want to carry, the more
Speaker 3: fuel you need. But that fuel has mass, so you
Speaker 3: need more fuel to lift that fuel and so on.
Speaker 3: It's brutal.
Speaker 2: But the Moon is different.
Speaker 3: The Moon has a much much shallower gravity. Well, it's
Speaker 3: about one six of the berths. It is vastly easier
Speaker 3: energetically speaking, to lift a kilogram of fuel from the
Speaker 3: lunar surface up to lunar orbit than it is to
Speaker 3: lift it from Earth's surface.
Speaker 2: So if you can refuel your spaceship at the Moon.
Speaker 3: You don't have to carry all your fuel for the
Speaker 3: return trip or for an onward journey to Mars all
Speaker 3: the way from the bottom of Earth's deep gravity pit.
Speaker 3: You can launch with just enough to get to the
Speaker 3: Moon and they top off the.
Speaker 2: Tanks, and that changes the math completely.
Speaker 3: It transforms the entire logistics of space travel. It makes
Speaker 3: the Moon a propellant depot, a stepping stone to the
Speaker 3: rest of the Solar System.
Speaker 2: So that's the why, that's the business case we need
Speaker 2: a gas station. But now let's talk about the how,
Speaker 2: because reading about the conditions on the Moon it sounds
Speaker 2: like an absolute nightmare. You called it a hostile job site.
Speaker 3: It is profoundly hostile. If you were a construction site
Speaker 3: manager on Earth and you were presented with the Moon
Speaker 3: as a job site, you would quit immediately. You'd cite
Speaker 3: safety violations that haven't even been invented yet.
Speaker 2: Okay, give me the list of grievances. What are these
Speaker 2: poor robots up against.
Speaker 3: Where do you even start? Let's let's start with temperature.
Speaker 3: The thermal extremes are just brutal. In the sunlight near
Speaker 3: the lunar equator, the surface can hit one hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty seven degrees celsius.
Speaker 2: So well above boiling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, water would boil off instantly, your equipment is becking.
Speaker 3: But the moment you step into shadow, or when the
Speaker 3: two week night falls, the temperature plummets to minus one
Speaker 3: hundred and seventy three degrees celsius.
Speaker 2: That is the three hundred degrees.
Speaker 3: Swing, a massive swing. And remember it's not equipped change.
Speaker 3: A lunar day is two weeks long, so you bake
Speaker 3: for fourteen earth days and then you deep freeze for
Speaker 3: fourteen earth days.
Speaker 2: What does that do to the machines.
Speaker 3: It's terrible for them. This thermal cycling just stresses materials
Speaker 3: like crazy. Metal expands and contracts over and over. Solder
Speaker 3: joints on electronics can crack. Batteries hate it. And if
Speaker 3: we're talking about the poles where the precious water is,
Speaker 3: it's even trickier. Why because the sun when you see
Speaker 3: it is always at a very low angle, just skimming
Speaker 3: the horizon, so you have these long, long, stretching shadows.
Speaker 3: You can go from sunlight to deep freeze just by
Speaker 3: moving a few feet, which.
Speaker 2: Means solar power becomes incredibly unreliable just when you need
Speaker 2: it most to run your heaters to survive the cold.
Speaker 3: Exactly, your robots are constantly chasing the light. But honestly,
Speaker 3: the temperature is a known problem. We can engineer for it. It's manageable.
Speaker 3: Compared to the real enemy, the dust, the regolith, I
Speaker 3: would argue, and most engineers in this field would agree.
Speaker 3: This is the number one engineering challenge for sustainable lunar operations.
Speaker 2: So explain this to me. Because on Earth dust is
Speaker 2: an annoyance. You know, I have to dust my bookshelf.
Speaker 2: Why is lunar dust a mission killer?
Speaker 3: Because it's not dust in the way we think of it.
Speaker 3: On Earth, we have weather, We have wind and water.
Speaker 3: Over millions of years, sand grains get tumbled in rivers
Speaker 3: are blown around in the desert. They rub against each
Speaker 3: other and all their sharp edges get worn down. They
Speaker 3: become rounded and.
Speaker 2: Smooth like sea glass.
Speaker 3: Perfect analogy It's like sea glass, but on the Moon
Speaker 3: there is no wind, there is no water, there is
Speaker 3: no erosion. The dust particles are created by micro meteorite
Speaker 3: impacts constantly smashing rocks.
Speaker 2: Apart, so they're not rounded.
Speaker 3: They are jagged, angular, microscopic shards. They are essentially tiny
Speaker 3: bits of broken glass ouch and it gets worse because
Speaker 3: of the solar wind bombarding the surface and the lack
Speaker 3: of a protective atmosphere. These little glass like particles are
Speaker 3: electrostatically charged. They are incredibly sticky.
Speaker 2: So it's sticky abrasive microscopic broken glass.
Speaker 3: That's what it is. And it gets everywhere. It sticks
Speaker 3: to spacesuits, It sticks to solar panels, blocking the light
Speaker 3: and reducing their efficiency. It works its way into gears
Speaker 3: and bearings and destroys them.
Speaker 2: I read an anecdote about the Apollo astronauts I think
Speaker 2: is Gene Cernan, who said the dust actually wore through
Speaker 2: multiple layers of his boots in just a few days.
Speaker 3: It did in just three days of walking around. The
Speaker 3: tough kevlar like material on their boots was being visibly
Speaker 3: chewed up. The dust clogged the joints of their suits,
Speaker 3: so they got a hard time moving their arms and legs,
Speaker 3: it scratched their helmet visors.
Speaker 2: So if that happens in three days to a human.
Speaker 3: Now imagine a robot that needs to operate for years,
Speaker 3: not days. If that dust gets into a rotary joint
Speaker 3: like in a robot's shoulder or a wheel axle, it
Speaker 3: acts like a grinding paste. It will literally destroy the
Speaker 3: machine from the inside out.
Speaker 2: So we have thermal shock, we have abrasive clinging dust.
Speaker 2: And then there's the vacuum.
Speaker 3: The vacuum creates its own whole suite of problems. The
Speaker 3: big one for any moving machine is lubrication.
Speaker 2: Right, you need oil or grease.
Speaker 3: On Earth, we use grease or oil to keep parts
Speaker 3: moving smoothly. But in a vacuum, standard liquids will outgas.
Speaker 3: They literally boil away into space, or evaporate, or in
Speaker 3: the shade they'll freeze solid. You can't just squirt wd
Speaker 3: foty on a lunar rover.
Speaker 2: So you have to invent entirely new ways to keep
Speaker 2: moving parts moving without seizing up.
Speaker 3: Solid lubricants, special metallic coatings, magnetic bearings. It's a massive
Speaker 3: materials science nightmare. And there's one more thing about the
Speaker 3: vacuum that people often forget about heat management.
Speaker 2: You mentioned it gets hot, but in a vacuum, isn't
Speaker 2: it also hard to get rid of heat?
Speaker 3: That's it exactly On Earth, if your computer gets hot,
Speaker 3: a fan blows air over the electronics, and the air
Speaker 3: carries the heat away. That's called convection. On the Moon,
Speaker 3: there's no air, there.
Speaker 2: Is no conduction, so the heat has nowhere to go.
Speaker 3: A robot's main computer can literally melt itself from the
Speaker 3: inside out, even if the external temperature is minus one
Speaker 3: hundred degrees because its own waste heat has no easy
Speaker 3: way to escape. You have to rely on big physical
Speaker 3: radiators to radiate the heat away as infrared light.
Speaker 2: And I read something interesting about sound too, or the
Speaker 2: lack of it.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is a subtle one, but it's really important
Speaker 3: for maintenance. Think about a mechanic listening to a car engine.
Speaker 3: You can hear if a bearing is starting to grind.
Speaker 3: You can hear if a belt is slipping. Audio is
Speaker 3: a huge diagnostic tool for us, but on the Moon
Speaker 3: there is no sound transmission through the air. A maintenance
Speaker 3: robot or a remote operator on Earth loses all those
Speaker 3: audio cues. You can't hear a motor failing, you have
Speaker 3: to rely entirely on vibration sensors and data streams.
Speaker 2: It really is a nightmare environment. And we haven't even
Speaker 2: touched on the simple fact that everything you send there
Speaker 2: has to be launched on a.
Speaker 3: Rocket mass and power constraints. Every single kilogram costs a
Speaker 3: fortune to launch. So your equipment has to be as
Speaker 3: a lightweight as possible, which usually means it's more fragile,
Speaker 3: but it also has to be rugged enough to survive
Speaker 3: the dust and the cold and the radiation.
Speaker 2: It's a total paradox.
Speaker 3: You need a tank that weighs as much as a bicycle,
Speaker 3: and it has to be fixable or even better manufacturable
Speaker 3: from local materials.
Speaker 2: So, knowing all that, knowing the job site is actively
Speaker 2: trying to kill your machines, what is in the tool belt?
Speaker 2: What kind of robots are we actually building to handle this?
Speaker 2: Because if wheels get stuck and bearings get ground down,
Speaker 2: what's the solution.
Speaker 3: The robotics community is getting very, very creative. They are
Speaker 3: developing entire new classes of systems specifically for these challenges.
Speaker 3: We can break it down into three main categories. Mobility, manipulation,
Speaker 3: and the really big one isru.
Speaker 2: Okay, mobility, we've done wheels. Wheels work for the most part.
Speaker 3: Wheels work great on the flat planes the seas where
Speaker 3: the Apollo missions landed. But remember the water of the
Speaker 3: most valuable resource is in the permanently shattered craters, and
Speaker 3: those are steep. The soil is very loose, very.
Speaker 2: Fluffy, terrible place for a wheeled vehicle. It's a trap.
Speaker 3: If you get a rover stuck in a crater on
Speaker 3: the Moon. There is no triple A, there is no
Speaker 3: tow truck. The mission is over. So we're seeing a
Speaker 3: divergence in mobility design.
Speaker 2: The virgins meaning not wheels, legs, legs.
Speaker 3: Several major research programs are looking at legged robots. You've
Speaker 3: seen the Boston Dynamics robots on Earth, right.
Speaker 2: The robot dogs, But yeah, they're kind of amazing and creepy.
Speaker 3: Right, That kind of technology is being adapted for the Moon.
Speaker 3: A legged robot can step over obstacles that wheels would
Speaker 3: get hung up on. They can climb much steeper gradients.
Speaker 3: They can potentially wade through deep soft dust where wheels
Speaker 3: would just spin.
Speaker 2: The wheels aren't totally dead, are they not?
Speaker 3: At all? But they are evolving. A great example is
Speaker 3: NASA's Viper rover. This isn't a real mission. It's being
Speaker 3: built now specifically to go to the South Pole and
Speaker 3: prospect for that ice.
Speaker 2: What's special about it It uses.
Speaker 3: A hybrid approach. It has four wheels, but it's not
Speaker 3: a passive chassis like a car. It has an active
Speaker 3: suspension that allows it to lift each of its four
Speaker 3: wheels independently like.
Speaker 2: Legs, so it can kind of tiptoe through the dust.
Speaker 3: It can literally lift a wheel up out of soft soil.
Speaker 3: If it starts to sink, it can swim its way
Speaker 3: through loose regolith by moving its wheels in a sort
Speaker 3: of paddling motion. The primary design requirement is to be unstuckable.
Speaker 2: Unstuckable I like that. That should be on the brochure.
Speaker 3: Because if Viper gets stuck, the billion dollar mission is over.
Speaker 2: Okay, so that's moving around. But you said builders, not
Speaker 2: just explorers. To build, they need hands manipulation.
Speaker 3: This is the second critical requirement. A robot that can
Speaker 3: only drive is just a tourist. To build, you need
Speaker 3: to be able to pick, place and assemble things.
Speaker 2: And I've got to imagine a robotic arm operating on
Speaker 2: the Moon is a whole different ballgame than one in
Speaker 2: a car, factor so much harder.
Speaker 3: In a factory, the lighting is perfect, the temperature is controlled,
Speaker 3: and the part it's picking up is always in the
Speaker 3: exact same place. On the Moon, you have the blinding
Speaker 3: glare of the sun next to the pitch black of
Speaker 3: a shadow.
Speaker 2: So the vision system has to handle extreme contrast.
Speaker 3: Extreme dynamic range, and you have that abrace of dust
Speaker 3: constantly trying to destroy your joints. So we're seeing new
Speaker 3: designs for multi arm robots, systems that can brace themselves
Speaker 3: with one arm against a rock while working with another arm.
Speaker 3: They need to be able to handle construction materials, connect
Speaker 3: power cables, maybe even repair other robots.
Speaker 2: That's the real dream, isn't it self sustaining systems, robots
Speaker 2: fixing robots.
Speaker 3: That's the sustainability loop. When a robot breaks a wheel,
Speaker 3: you don't send a new robot from Earth. Another robot
Speaker 3: comes over and swaps out the wheel assembly. That's when
Speaker 3: you know you have a real permanent presence.
Speaker 2: But the real magic trick, and this is the term
Speaker 2: I saw in the notes I really want to dig into,
Speaker 2: is isru.
Speaker 3: In situ resourceization.
Speaker 2: This is the holy grail.
Speaker 3: This is everything living off the lamb exactly. This is
Speaker 3: the only way that long term space settlement works. From
Speaker 3: an economic standpoint, we cannot ship concrete from Earth. We
Speaker 3: cannot ship steel beams. It's just too heavy, too expensive.
Speaker 3: We have to make our building materials out of what
Speaker 3: is already there.
Speaker 2: So how do you make building materials out of sharp, dusty,
Speaker 2: electrostatically charged sand.
Speaker 3: There are a few really fascinating ways being developed. One
Speaker 3: of the most promising is called centering.
Speaker 2: Centering. I've heard this word, but explain the physics of
Speaker 2: it to me.
Speaker 3: Basically, centering is heating a powdered material until the individual
Speaker 3: particles stick together, but you're not quite melting it into
Speaker 3: a liquid.
Speaker 2: Okay, So how do you do that on the Moon?
Speaker 3: You use focused energy microwaves or high powered lasers, all
Speaker 3: running off solar panels. A robot could drive along, aiming
Speaker 3: a laser at the ground in front.
Speaker 2: Of it, like a giant laser pointer, a.
Speaker 3: Very powerful one. It heats the regolith to over one
Speaker 3: thousand degrees celsius. The sharp edges of those dust grains
Speaker 3: start to get good and they fuse together. When it
Speaker 3: cools a few seconds later, you have a solid ceramic
Speaker 3: like block.
Speaker 2: So you could just pave a road as you drive.
Speaker 3: You could pave a road, you could build a landing pad.
Speaker 3: And that landing pad is absolutely critical. Why because when
Speaker 3: a rocket lands on the raw lunar surface, the exhaust
Speaker 3: plume blasts that abrace of dust everywhere at hypersonic speeds.
Speaker 3: It's like a sand blaster from Hell. It would shred
Speaker 3: any nearby habitats or equipment. So the very first thing
Speaker 3: the robots need to do is build a tough, cinered
Speaker 3: landing pad to keep the dust down.
Speaker 2: That is so cool. So the first robot lands and
Speaker 2: its first job is to drive around pointing a laser
Speaker 2: at the ground, and it literally bakes a floor into
Speaker 2: existence for the next landers.
Speaker 3: That's the plan. The European Space Agency is also doing
Speaker 3: a lot of research into three D printing, using the
Speaker 3: regolith as.
Speaker 2: The ink giant three D printers on the Moon.
Speaker 3: Exactly, you'd have a robot that scoops up the dust,
Speaker 3: maybe mixes it with a small amount of a binding
Speaker 3: agent you brought from Earth or when you synthesize there,
Speaker 3: and you just print structure's layer by layer what kind
Speaker 3: of structures. The big one is radiation shielding. Humans can't
Speaker 3: survive long term on the surface without it. The Moon
Speaker 3: has no atmosphere or magnetic field to protect from cosmic
Speaker 3: rays and solar flares. So robots can print these thick walls,
Speaker 3: maybe in a honeycomb structure that you then fill with
Speaker 3: loose regolith to create a radiation proof habitat.
Speaker 2: So they build the house before the people even move.
Speaker 3: In, They build the shelter before the humans ever arrive.
Speaker 2: And then there's the water extraction we talked about. That's
Speaker 2: another huge form of ISRU that.
Speaker 3: Is basically a mobile chemical processing plant. It's a whole chain.
Speaker 3: You need a robot that acts as an excavator, digging
Speaker 3: up the icy soil. Then a haller robot, maybe an
Speaker 3: autonomous dump truck, takes it to a central processing unit.
Speaker 3: In what happens there, the processor heats the soil in
Speaker 3: a sealed chamber. The water ice turns to steam. You
Speaker 3: capture the steam, condense it back to liquid, purify it,
Speaker 3: and then you zap it with electricity electrolysis to split
Speaker 3: it into pure hydrogen and your oxygen, which you then
Speaker 3: cryogenically cool into liquid rocket fuel.
Speaker 2: It seems like we're asking these robots to do an
Speaker 2: awful lot. You've got excavators, pavers, three D printers, chemical refineries.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of brain power.
Speaker 3: Needed, and that brings us to the brain because none
Speaker 3: of this works without advanced AI.
Speaker 2: And I assume we're not talking about a robot that
Speaker 2: just follows a simple script like on an assembly line.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. Scripted automation. Move arm ten centimeters
Speaker 3: right close gripper is fine for a factory where nothing
Speaker 3: ever changes. But on the moon, every rock is different,
Speaker 3: the lighting changes constantly as the sun moves, shadows creep
Speaker 3: across the landscape. You need flexible adaptive intelligence, So machine learning.
Speaker 3: Huge advances in machine learning are what's making this possible.
Speaker 3: Specifically in computer vision and perception. A decade ago, computer
Speaker 3: vision was still pretty iffy. A robot might mistake a
Speaker 3: dark shadow for a hole and get stuck. Right now,
Speaker 3: using deep learning, these robots can understand terrain in a
Speaker 3: much more nuanced way. They can classify hazards. They can
Speaker 3: look at a pile of rocks and not just see
Speaker 3: an obstacle, but identify the safest and most efficient path through.
Speaker 2: It all on their own, but we still have that
Speaker 2: two point six second delay. So how much are we
Speaker 2: controlling them and how much are they doing themselves.
Speaker 3: We are hitting a real sweet spot in the middle,
Speaker 3: and the term for it is shared autonomy. This is
Speaker 3: human robot teeming.
Speaker 2: Okay, how does that work in practice? What does that
Speaker 2: look like?
Speaker 3: Think of the robot as a smart intern, or maybe
Speaker 3: a well trained sheep dog and a shepherd. The human
Speaker 3: operator on Earth gives a high level command, not move
Speaker 3: forward one meter, but go to that crater rim over
Speaker 3: there and dig a trench two meters long.
Speaker 2: Do you give it the goal?
Speaker 3: You give it the goal. The robot then handles all
Speaker 3: the routine tasks autonomously. It figures out the best way
Speaker 3: to drive there. It avoids the rocks, It manages its power,
Speaker 3: It digs the trench. But if it gets into a
Speaker 3: situation it doesn't understand. If it gets stuck, or if
Speaker 3: it sees a rock formation that looks geologically weird or
Speaker 3: potentially dangerous, it stops.
Speaker 2: It raises its hand and asks for help.
Speaker 3: It calls home. It sends an alert to the human operator.
Speaker 3: Hey boss, I'm stuck or I don't know what this
Speaker 3: shiny thing is the human on Earth. Then steps in,
Speaker 3: looks at all the high res data, makes the judgment
Speaker 3: call okay, that's just a shadow. You can keep going
Speaker 3: or no, backup carefully and go to the left, and
Speaker 3: then hands control back to the robot's autonomous system.
Speaker 2: That sounds incredibly efficient. It solves the boredom problem for
Speaker 2: the human who doesn't have to micromanage, and the safety
Speaker 2: problem for the robot.
Speaker 3: It's perfect. It fits that two point six second communication
Speaker 3: delay perfectly. You don't need the stress of real time joysticking.
Speaker 3: But you still have human creativity and judgment on tap
Speaker 3: for the tricky edge cases.
Speaker 2: And are these robots working alone or are we talking
Speaker 2: about teams of them?
Speaker 3: Multi robot coordination is the next big frontier. It has
Speaker 3: to be because a real construction site isn't just one
Speaker 3: guy with a shovel. You need excavators and dump trucks
Speaker 3: and bulldozers and pavers. They all have to work together
Speaker 3: without getting in each other's way.
Speaker 2: You need a swarm the construction crew.
Speaker 3: You need a choreograph system. There's amazing research happening at
Speaker 3: places like MIT and with ESA on how you get
Speaker 3: swarms of robots to collaborate without a human micromanaging every interaction.
Speaker 3: Imagine an autonomous excavator that knows when an autonomous holler
Speaker 3: is approaching. It fills the haller's bucket, and the holler
Speaker 3: knows exactly when to pull away and drive to the
Speaker 3: centering robot. It's an industrial ballet.
Speaker 2: And they have to do all this without GPS. Right
Speaker 2: there is no GPS on the moon.
Speaker 3: Correct, no GPS, no magnetic compass to speak of. They
Speaker 3: have to navigate relative to each other and the landscape
Speaker 3: using visual landmarks, star trekers, and local radio beacons. It's
Speaker 3: a massive, massive software challenge.
Speaker 2: It honestly sounds like a sci fi movie, But you're
Speaker 2: saying the tech is actually being built right now.
Speaker 3: It is moving from the research lab to the development phase.
Speaker 3: We are past the what if stage and we are
Speaker 3: deep into the how do we engineer this to be reliable? Stage?
Speaker 2: So let's zoom out. Let's say it works. We build
Speaker 2: the road, the robots build the base, They pave the roads,
Speaker 2: they print the walls, they fill the gas tanks. What
Speaker 2: is the payoff? What does a fully constructed lunar infrastructure
Speaker 2: actually give us in the long run?
Speaker 3: It gives us three main things, and they're all transformative.
Speaker 3: It gives us a sustainable human presence, It kicks off
Speaker 3: a new space economy, and it enables science we can't
Speaker 3: do anywhere else.
Speaker 2: Okay, sustainable presence. That's the difference between just visiting and
Speaker 2: actually living there.
Speaker 3: Apollo was a camping trip, a magnificent one, but a
Speaker 3: camping trip you bring everything with you, your tent, your food,
Speaker 3: your water, your air. You stay a few days, you leave,
Speaker 3: and you leave nothing behind but the descent stage and
Speaker 3: a flag. Right, Artemis and the future lunar architecture are
Speaker 3: about settlement. To stay, you need permanent radiation shielding. You
Speaker 3: need power grids that can survive the two week night.
Speaker 3: You need life support systems that recycle air and water.
Speaker 3: If robots build all that critical infrastructure before the humans arrive,
Speaker 3: then the humans can stay for months or even.
Speaker 2: Years, and they can actually do meaningful work instead of
Speaker 2: spending their whole time just trying to survive.
Speaker 3: Exactly, they become scientists and explorers, not just campers.
Speaker 2: And the economy part that goes back to the gas.
Speaker 3: Station, the propellant economy. This is the big one. If
Speaker 3: we can refuel spaceships in space. The entire Solar System
Speaker 3: opens up. A trip to Mars becomes dramatically cheaper and
Speaker 3: more feasible because you don't have to launch the fuel
Speaker 3: for the return journey from Earth.
Speaker 2: You can launch with your tanks mostly empty and just
Speaker 2: fill up at the Moon.
Speaker 3: Yes, the asteroid belt, with all its mineral resources, becomes accessible.
Speaker 3: It fundamentally changes the rocket equation from a barrier into
Speaker 3: a gateway.
Speaker 2: It effectively shrinks the Solar System. Logistically speaking, it does.
Speaker 3: It lowers the toll you have to pay to Earth
Speaker 3: gravity to get anywhere interesting.
Speaker 2: And the science. You mentioned the far side of the Moon.
Speaker 2: What's so special about that?
Speaker 3: The far side of the Moon is a unique place
Speaker 3: in the Solar System. It is permanently shielded from the
Speaker 3: planet Earth, which means it is blocked from all of
Speaker 3: our planet's radio noise.
Speaker 2: I mean our TV broadcasts, Wi Fi all that.
Speaker 3: All our TV broadcasts, our radar, our cell phones, our
Speaker 3: GPS satellites. From a radio perspective, the Earth is a
Speaker 3: screamingly loud ball of noise.
Speaker 2: It's noise pollution for radio astronomy.
Speaker 3: It's terrible. It drowns out the faint whispers from the
Speaker 3: distant universe, but the far side is in the radio
Speaker 3: shadow of the Moon. It is the quietest place in
Speaker 3: the inner Solar System. If robots could build a radio
Speaker 3: telescope there.
Speaker 2: Like a giant dish, like a recibo, but in a.
Speaker 3: Crater, it could be a dish, or it could be
Speaker 3: even simpler, just long wire antennas unrolled over kilometers of
Speaker 3: the surface. With that, we could listen to the universe
Speaker 3: at very low frequencies that we can't hear from Earth.
Speaker 3: We could listen to the cosmic dawn, the faint signal
Speaker 3: from the arrow when the very first stars in the
Speaker 3: universe turned on.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: We could answer fundamental questions about the origins of the
Speaker 3: cosmos that we simply cannot answer from down here.
Speaker 2: What about that thing that always comes up in sci fi?
Speaker 2: Helium three? Is that a real thing?
Speaker 3: It is real, but it's much more more speculative. Helium
Speaker 3: three is an isotope that is very rare on Earth,
Speaker 3: but it's been deposited in the lunar regolith by the
Speaker 3: solar wind for billions of years. It is a potential
Speaker 3: fuel for clean nuclear fusion reactors.
Speaker 2: But the catch is we don't really have working fusion
Speaker 2: reactors yet.
Speaker 3: We don't, so that's a long term prospect. That market
Speaker 3: relies on us actually mastering fusion power on Earth first.
Speaker 3: But there are also other resources, rare Earth elements needed
Speaker 3: for electronics, the potential for massive solar power generation, building
Speaker 3: huge solar farms on the Moon and beaming the energy
Speaker 3: back to Earth or using it for industry there.
Speaker 2: But the key to all of this is that none
Speaker 2: of it happens, not the telescope, not the helium mining,
Speaker 2: not the propellant for the Mars mission without the robots
Speaker 2: going first.
Speaker 3: None of it, the industrial speculation, the incredible science, the
Speaker 3: human settlement, it all relies on the robotic infrastructure existing first.
Speaker 3: You can't have a city without laying the foundation and
Speaker 3: the power lines and the water pipes first. The robots
Speaker 3: are doing that for us.
Speaker 2: It really feels like we are at a tipping point,
Speaker 2: like this isn't just theory anymore.
Speaker 3: We absolutely are. The technology is moving out of the
Speaker 3: lab and into flight hardware. We have the Viper rover
Speaker 3: coming up. We have the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, the
Speaker 3: CLPS program where NASA is paying private companies to send landers.
Speaker 3: We have the Artemis timeline. This is not just PowerPoint
Speaker 3: presentations anymore. Metal is being cut, code is being written.
Speaker 2: It's happening.
Speaker 3: It is happening, and I think it's important to just
Speaker 3: for a moment, take a more philosophical perspective on all this.
Speaker 2: Okay, laid on me.
Speaker 3: We tend to focus on the human boots on the ground.
Speaker 3: That's the heroic image we all want to see. We
Speaker 3: want to see the astronauts saluting the flag. But the
Speaker 3: Moon and space in general will be developed primarily by robots.
Speaker 3: These machines are extensions of us. They are the physical
Speaker 3: embodiment of human curiosity and ingenuity.
Speaker 2: They are our avatars or proxies in a way.
Speaker 3: Yes, And they carry no flags, They feel no wonder
Speaker 3: they don't get goosebumps when they see the Earth rise
Speaker 3: over the lunar horizon. Robot doesn't know what's.
Speaker 2: Making history, but they're the ones making that history possible.
Speaker 3: Exactly. I want you to think about this. When an
Speaker 3: astronaut eventually stands on the Moon again, maybe in a
Speaker 3: few years, maybe in a decade, and they look back
Speaker 3: at our home planet, that little blue marble, they will
Speaker 3: feel that transcendence that overview effect that profound emotional connection
Speaker 3: to our home. Ye. But the floor they are standing on,
Speaker 3: that hard sintered landing pad that's protecting them.
Speaker 2: From the dust, built by a robot.
Speaker 3: The thick walls of their habitat protecting them from deadly
Speaker 3: radiation printed by a robot. The fuel in the tanks
Speaker 3: of their ascent vehicle that gets them home safely to
Speaker 3: their families, mind refined and pumped by a robot.
Speaker 2: That is a powerful image. The silent architects.
Speaker 3: They are the foundation of everything that comes next. The
Speaker 3: machines go first into the silence so we can follow.
Speaker 2: So here's my question for you listening to this deep dive.
Speaker 2: We always talk about the human exploration of space. But
Speaker 2: if the robots are doing the heavy lifting, the building,
Speaker 2: the mining, the driving, at what point does it stop
Speaker 2: being purely human exploration and start becoming the expansion of
Speaker 2: machine intelligence with us just tagging along for the ride.
Speaker 2: What does that distinction even matter?
Speaker 3: That is the question of the century, isn't it. As
Speaker 3: our tools get smarter and more autonomous, do they become
Speaker 3: the explorers and we become the observers cheering them on
Speaker 3: from home?
Speaker 2: Something to think about next time. You look up at
Speaker 2: the moon. It might look the same as it always has,
Speaker 2: that cold gray, silent rock. But pretty soon it's going
Speaker 2: to get a lot.
Speaker 3: Busier up there, a lot more metallic.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on this deep dive into the
Speaker 2: Robotic Frontier. It's a fascinating time to be watching the sky.
Speaker 3: Always a pleasure.
Speaker 2: Catch you on the next deep dive.