Building a lunar base with telerobots is plausible. Building a Mars base this way, much less so.kunkmiester wrote:I think a moon base would be feasible for less than a couple of billion, including a fair amount of habitation. A lot of robotic construction, and sending machines to build machines to build machines and things though. Since the cost for getting to LEO dominates, especially for slower robotic/unmanned missions, a Mars base shouldn't cost too much more.
Light lag to the Moon: 3 seconds
Light lag to Mars: ten to fifty minutes.
Another thing you need for telerobots is lots of bandwidth. Since signal strength falls with inverse square of distance, high lunar bandwidth is less challenging than high band width to Mars telerobots.
It would take numerous missions to send the equipment to build infrastructure. 30 missions to the moon would be accomplished in a few years. Since Mars launch windows are each 2.14 years, 30 missions could take six decades.