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Maintenance is always done on site. Do you think the workers on oil rigs take a commute to land every night? No, so people are going to need to live in space to solve problems in space.

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Maintenance can be done by robots. Unlike on oil platforms, there is no free air in space.

Until a general purpose robot that can do all the things a human can do is developed and can be more cheaply deployed than a human, a human's gonna do it instead.

That is true. But keep in mind two things: first, the robot does not have to be fully autonomous, and second, maintaining a human in space is so expensive that we already have such robots. Just look at Curiosity and its cousins.

I don't think Curiosity and its cousins can tighten down leaky bolts on pipe connections, which is what I think of when the term "maintenance" comes up. The closest we have right now in that vicinity is Spot from Boston Dynamics, and it basically only acts as a universal monitoring tool to go yell at a human to fix things.

I guess what I'm saying is that robots can identify problem points, but at the current time can't actually troubleshoot or resolve those problems. Those are really difficult problems to solve.

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