Why the next astronauts won’t be androids

The dream of going to Mars, colonizing Europa, commuting to your office on the moon, and luxury vacations on space hotels all rely on one thing: rockets. And rockets do not come cheap: A single SpaceX Falcon 9 launch costs well over $50m USD, and even Elon Musk agrees that the cost of launches needs to shrink, even with rocket reusability in the mix. Along with this, is the insane complexity of harboring human life millions of miles away.

Having humans onboard complicates things, as when you have a human, there’s more than a monetary cost and virtually no margin for error. . You’ll need to be, at the very minimum, carrying life support, pressurization, water and waste recycling, nutritious and sustaining food, and emergency equipment. This already cost millions of dollars and a whole workforce of people within space agencies to sustain. But usually, you’ll also be ferrying expensive science experiments, probes, additional structures if you’re heading to another planet, and so much more.

This is why some space enthusiasts say that its better for AI androids do the parts where you actually explore space — a trip to Mars takes 8 months, and on top of that the mental and physical effects of that are unknown. An Android wouldn’t have to deal with stress, loneliness, radiation and atrophy. They aren’t limited to a narrow margin of temperature and pressure, and many of them are easily standardized. — so replacing astronauts with robots does have its pros.

Additionally, future-Mars astronauts taking the journey to the red planet would not really be able to see Earth at some points of the journey, if they looked really hard, it might appear as a small speck or smudge if they got far enough. Soon enough, it’d appear almost like another star in the milky way. Researchers fear serious mental implications for astronauts stuck halfway between Mars and Earth, hundreds of millions of kilometers from any planet. No human has ever found themselves in such a situation, and simply thinking about it is harrowing. Thankfully, AI doesn’t really think, does it?

So having an AI do the heavy-lifting has its pros, but it also has cons. The fleet of robotic explorers combing through Mars either from the air or on the ground still doesn’t feel like proper space exploration, though. At one point, you’d also have to question the point of even sending androids out — a humanoid robot is no more human than the onboard computer just because it has a torso and metallic arms and legs, so you may as well turn the androids into an onboard computer…but for an empty cabin? Precious space that could be used to cram in more equipment and more fuel? Well then remove the cabin. And at that point you simply have a regular probe.

Some might argue that space exploration is about a fundamentally human drive. Not one of a mindless AI following programmed orders. Don’t get me wrong, AI is amazing, but all the helicopters and orbiters and rovers on Mars right now still don’t feel like we’ve accomplished the exploration of Mars — it instead feels like a prerequisite to something bigger.

So when can we expect this bigger push, when we can see how AI in space exploration can be applied; the first humans landing on Mars? Preliminary estimates indicate sometime in the late 2030s or early 2040s, which is 20 years from now. That being said, crewed missions to the moon are expected to launch next year with NASA’s Artemis 2. Artemis 3 will be the first crewed landing on the moon, scheduled for 2025, however that will likely slip by several years and is dependent on Starship being successful as it will act in the capacity of a lunar lander.

So if you are interested in space exploration, whether as a human or an AI, the best thing you can do is tune in to the next Starship launch sometime later this year.