/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12558539
Why the fuck would you not just control the vehicle in person? I can see making them optionally manned so that when Starships first touch down and there's no other habitat to retire to, that it might be easier to sit at an observation window with a secondary bank of camera screens and control work from there, but more work will be done in a single day with no time lag then could be done in months or even years with the time lag.
What twenty minutes time lag actually means is forty minutes lag on every action. Forty minutes for you to order the vehicle to do anything, plus another twenty to see what your action actually caused. Imagine digging a trench but you have to stand still for an hour each time you make one movement.
This would be an inconceivably wasteful expenditure of time, even just suiting up and going outside to work by hand for an hour would be more productive.
>>12558546
It wouldn't be incredibly high, the trip out there itself will incur the worst radiation exposure, and that assumes crewed ships will not have any more shielding than just their 2mm thick steel hull. With 100mT of mass budget at Crewship could easily spend some of that on like a half inch of boron rubber shielding within the crew compartments, plus they will travel with the engines pointed towards the sun, which means the thrust puck, fuel tanks and the crew's water tank will also be between them and the most regular source of ionizing radiation.