How Will We Travel on Mars Itself?

[crandles57]

Fiber laser cutter & welder, yes, but no to humanoid robots. They are just not there yet.

For dissasembly, Start at the top of the landed ship and work your way down, lowering the  pieces with a cable. No individual piece needs to be very large or heavy.

- How do the humanoid robots charge up while they are up there?

- Are you assuming there will be a large crane?

- And you seem to be assuming that the material for the "truck" is coming from the curved section of the nose, which is half covered in tiles (which have to be removed first). I would think the middle section for the propellant tanks would have the material that would be needed for truck construction.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1922083384085430492

Though I do realise we don't get much info on how easily trained to do complex movements.

A crane that extends out the payload door will be available. Once you cut down the attachment points, you need to fit it at a lower level and have places for the robots to stand to do the cutting which may be tricky. Once the payload is emptied attach cable(s) and pull it over then cut it up?

[DanClemmensen]

You can build the structural parts and probably the wheels from stainless steel salvaged from the Ship. You will still need payload mass for the battery, solar panels, motors, electronics, and some precision mechanical parts.

- How do the humanoid robots charge up while they are up there?

- Are you assuming there will be a large crane?

- And you seem to be assuming that the material for the "truck" is coming from the curved section of the nose, which is half covered in tiles (which have to be removed first). I would think the middle section for the propellant tanks would have the material that would be needed for truck construction.

Fiber laser torches and welders consume electricity, not gas, and I think they will work well in the Martian atmosphere of 6 millibar of CO₂.

Electricity is much better than gas that isn't common with Starship propulsion, but where are you getting the power from? Power will be a scarce resource on Mars for a long time, and will probably be one of the moderators of how quickly colonization can increase.

Sorry, I was unclear. I was discussing a single Ship carrying stuff to build a restricted set of stuff. Yes, it gets dissasembled from the top down.

No, the specific material for the vehicle chassis may not be from the top. The curved sections will be removed and saved for other projects.

No dissassembled part needs to have a mass of more than one tonne. This can be handled by a very small "crane" whose booms are made from salvaged stainless steel, plus a winch with a light-duty cable.

No hatch is needed. The robots can cut their way out.

The "humanoid robots" are not making any sort of  sophisticated decisions. It's all preprogrammed. Every cut, every winch operation, every weld are all planned in advance. The robots are not much more than 6-axis CNC machines.

The Ship is assumed to have electrical power available for the robots and other equipment. If this is not true for my scenario, then most other scenarios are in trouble also and we will need to carry solar panels as payload and lay them out on the surface in an early step of the process.

[Lampyridae]

You can build the structural parts and probably the wheels from stainless steel salvaged from the Ship. You will still need payload mass for the battery, solar panels, motors, electronics, and some precision mechanical parts.

- How do the humanoid robots charge up while they are up there?

- Are you assuming there will be a large crane?

- And you seem to be assuming that the material for the "truck" is coming from the curved section of the nose, which is half covered in tiles (which have to be removed first). I would think the middle section for the propellant tanks would have the material that would be needed for truck construction.

Fiber laser torches and welders consume electricity, not gas, and I think they will work well in the Martian atmosphere of 6 millibar of CO₂.

Electricity is much better than gas that isn't common with Starship propulsion, but where are you getting the power from? Power will be a scarce resource on Mars for a long time, and will probably be one of the moderators of how quickly colonization can increase.

Sorry, I was unclear. I was discussing a single Ship carrying stuff to build a restricted set of stuff. Yes, it gets dissasembled from the top down.

No, the specific material for the vehicle chassis may not be from the top. The curved sections will be removed and saved for other projects.

No dissassembled part needs to have a mass of more than one tonne. This can be handled by a very small "crane" whose booms are made from salvaged stainless steel, plus a winch with a light-duty cable.

No hatch is needed. The robots can cut their way out.

The "humanoid robots" are not making any sort of  sophisticated decisions. It's all preprogrammed. Every cut, every winch operation, every weld are all planned in advance. The robots are not much more than 6-axis CNC machines.

The Ship is assumed to have electrical power available for the robots and other equipment. If this is not true for my scenario, then most other scenarios are in trouble also and we will need to carry solar panels as payload and lay them out on the surface in an early step of the process.

Why not just go full 6-axis machine then. Just put a laser on an arm somewhere inside the Starship? Have little wheeled robots carry and stack. Cut out enough and the Starship turns into a factory space. Other robot arms hold, bend and weld. Like a mini Tesla factory.

[DanClemmensen]

You can build the structural parts and probably the wheels from stainless steel salvaged from the Ship. You will still need payload mass for the battery, solar panels, motors, electronics, and some precision mechanical parts.

- How do the humanoid robots charge up while they are up there?

- Are you assuming there will be a large crane?

- And you seem to be assuming that the material for the "truck" is coming from the curved section of the nose, which is half covered in tiles (which have to be removed first). I would think the middle section for the propellant tanks would have the material that would be needed for truck construction.

Fiber laser torches and welders consume electricity, not gas, and I think they will work well in the Martian atmosphere of 6 millibar of CO₂.

Electricity is much better than gas that isn't common with Starship propulsion, but where are you getting the power from? Power will be a scarce resource on Mars for a long time, and will probably be one of the moderators of how quickly colonization can increase.

Sorry, I was unclear. I was discussing a single Ship carrying stuff to build a restricted set of stuff. Yes, it gets dissasembled from the top down.

No, the specific material for the vehicle chassis may not be from the top. The curved sections will be removed and saved for other projects.

No dissassembled part needs to have a mass of more than one tonne. This can be handled by a very small "crane" whose booms are made from salvaged stainless steel, plus a winch with a light-duty cable.

No hatch is needed. The robots can cut their way out.

The "humanoid robots" are not making any sort of  sophisticated decisions. It's all preprogrammed. Every cut, every winch operation, every weld are all planned in advance. The robots are not much more than 6-axis CNC machines.

The Ship is assumed to have electrical power available for the robots and other equipment. If this is not true for my scenario, then most other scenarios are in trouble also and we will need to carry solar panels as payload and lay them out on the surface in an early step of the process.

Why not just go full 6-axis machine then. Just put a laser on an arm somewhere inside the Starship? Have little wheeled robots carry and stack. Cut out enough and the Starship turns into a factory space. Other robot arms hold, bend and weld. Like a mini Tesla factory.

I assumed general-purpose robot hardware because it can be used for other tasks in addition to Ship dissassembly and rover chassis building. I believe two general-purpose robot chassis can do the pre-programmed dissasembly. Two, because the wincihng step works better with one at the top and one at the bottom. We are probably power-limited, so multiple parallel specialized robots will not help much, and we don't need a high-production factory to disassemble one Ship and build only the number of rovers that consume one Ship's worth of steel.
 Required hardware:
    two humanoid robots
    two fiber laser cutter/welders (optimized for Mars)
    one winch with 50 meters of cable
    one pulley
You of course still need all the manufactured parts of your rovers other than the chassis and wheels.
   The fiber laser cutter/welders are probably around 2000 Watts. They must be optimized for Mars because the ones we use on Earth are air or water cooled. Welding will not need the Argon used on Earth.

[punder]

You can build the structural parts and probably the wheels from stainless steel salvaged from the Ship. You will still need payload mass for the battery, solar panels, motors, electronics, and some precision mechanical parts.

- How do the humanoid robots charge up while they are up there?

- Are you assuming there will be a large crane?

- And you seem to be assuming that the material for the "truck" is coming from the curved section of the nose, which is half covered in tiles (which have to be removed first). I would think the middle section for the propellant tanks would have the material that would be needed for truck construction.

Fiber laser torches and welders consume electricity, not gas, and I think they will work well in the Martian atmosphere of 6 millibar of CO₂.

Electricity is much better than gas that isn't common with Starship propulsion, but where are you getting the power from? Power will be a scarce resource on Mars for a long time, and will probably be one of the moderators of how quickly colonization can increase.

Sorry, I was unclear. I was discussing a single Ship carrying stuff to build a restricted set of stuff. Yes, it gets dissasembled from the top down.

No, the specific material for the vehicle chassis may not be from the top. The curved sections will be removed and saved for other projects.

No dissassembled part needs to have a mass of more than one tonne. This can be handled by a very small "crane" whose booms are made from salvaged stainless steel, plus a winch with a light-duty cable.

No hatch is needed. The robots can cut their way out.

The "humanoid robots" are not making any sort of  sophisticated decisions. It's all preprogrammed. Every cut, every winch operation, every weld are all planned in advance. The robots are not much more than 6-axis CNC machines.

The Ship is assumed to have electrical power available for the robots and other equipment. If this is not true for my scenario, then most other scenarios are in trouble also and we will need to carry solar panels as payload and lay them out on the surface in an early step of the process.

As long as we’re cutting up landers, why not cut off the pressure vessels (of crew landers that won’t return, be used as habs, or employed otherwise) and place them on truck suspensions? (Somewhat) instant crewed surface vehicle.

Actually this could also be done to unpressurized landers, for cargo carriers.

[DanClemmensen]

You can build the structural parts and probably the wheels from stainless steel salvaged from the Ship. You will still need payload mass for the battery, solar panels, motors, electronics, and some precision mechanical parts.

- How do the humanoid robots charge up while they are up there?

- Are you assuming there will be a large crane?

- And you seem to be assuming that the material for the "truck" is coming from the curved section of the nose, which is half covered in tiles (which have to be removed first). I would think the middle section for the propellant tanks would have the material that would be needed for truck construction.

Fiber laser torches and welders consume electricity, not gas, and I think they will work well in the Martian atmosphere of 6 millibar of CO₂.

Electricity is much better than gas that isn't common with Starship propulsion, but where are you getting the power from? Power will be a scarce resource on Mars for a long time, and will probably be one of the moderators of how quickly colonization can increase.

Sorry, I was unclear. I was discussing a single Ship carrying stuff to build a restricted set of stuff. Yes, it gets dissasembled from the top down.

No, the specific material for the vehicle chassis may not be from the top. The curved sections will be removed and saved for other projects.

No dissassembled part needs to have a mass of more than one tonne. This can be handled by a very small "crane" whose booms are made from salvaged stainless steel, plus a winch with a light-duty cable.

No hatch is needed. The robots can cut their way out.

The "humanoid robots" are not making any sort of  sophisticated decisions. It's all preprogrammed. Every cut, every winch operation, every weld are all planned in advance. The robots are not much more than 6-axis CNC machines.

The Ship is assumed to have electrical power available for the robots and other equipment. If this is not true for my scenario, then most other scenarios are in trouble also and we will need to carry solar panels as payload and lay them out on the surface in an early step of the process.

As long as we’re cutting up landers, why not cut off the pressure vessels (of crew landers that won’t return, be used as habs, or employed otherwise) and place them on truck suspensions? (Somewhat) instant crewed surface vehicle.

Actually this could also be done to unpressurized landers, for cargo carriers.

Rigging for this is a lot harder. It's a large heavy mass that must be handled as a unit. My proposal is to slice into pieces that are no more than one tonne apiece, to be handled by small winches and small robots. I'm fairly sure that the largest sliced piece will actually be less than 100 kg. some pre-built components (motors, batteries) might be heavier, as will the robots themselves, which is why the winch must be rated at one tonne.

If I had a need to start from a 9-meter element, I would wait until I got all the way down to near the thrust puck. But that's an unwieldy size for a vehicle.

[Coastal Ron]

Why not just go full 6-axis machine then. Just put a laser on an arm somewhere inside the Starship? Have little wheeled robots carry and stack. Cut out enough and the Starship turns into a factory space. Other robot arms hold, bend and weld. Like a mini Tesla factory.

I assumed general-purpose robot hardware because it can be used for other tasks in addition to Ship dissassembly and rover chassis building.

Except that general purpose humanoid robots today can't do any of that. Or I should say, have not shown the ability to do that in applications here on Earth. And if they can't do it here on Earth, then doing it on Mars will be a lot harder.

I believe two general-purpose robot chassis can do the pre-programmed dissasembly.

I see the same irrational exuberance around humanoid robots as I do with AI software these days. Until you actually SEE a humanoid robot demonstrating IN REAL LIFE APPLICATIONS the tasks you want them to do on Mars, they can't yet do it.

For instance, I own a Tesla Model Y, but I have NEVER believed anything Elon Musk has said about Full Self Driving (FSD). He has been promising it was right around the corner since 2018, and it still isn't here (I've tried it, and see no reason to buy it).

And it is the same with the Tesla Optimus robot. I've been following the end-effector field for humanoid robots since I was in college, and while dancing and running robots abound, using humanoid robots for general purpose tasks has not happened yet. Why? Because the combination of abilities to do dextrous detailed work, quickly, has not been realized yet.

Which is why Lampyridae's suggestion of task-specific equipment is a good one.

Two, because the wincihng step works better with one at the top and one at the bottom. We are probably power-limited, so multiple parallel specialized robots will not help much, and we don't need a high-production factory to disassemble one Ship and build only the number of rovers that consume one Ship's worth of steel.

Time is a factor here, from the standpoint of when you start and when a rover is needed. In other words, if this turns out to be a 10-year project, then it probably is not worth the effort. And modern planning systems today could estimate how many man-hours it would take to do this project, and then you would multiply by some X-factor for how much less capable humanoid robots are in doing the same tasks.

Required hardware:
    two humanoid robots
    two fiber laser cutter/welders (optimized for Mars)
    one winch with 50 meters of cable
    one pulley
You of course still need all the manufactured parts of your rovers other than the chassis and wheels.
   The fiber laser cutter/welders are probably around 2000 Watts. They must be optimized for Mars because the ones we use on Earth are air or water cooled. Welding will not need the Argon used on Earth.

My gut tells me you are seriously under-resourcing this effort, and not taking into account equipment failures and the time it will take overall for this project.

So if the goal is to land one ship, and have one or more land vehicles produced by the time the next ship arrives in 2 years, I doubt this will work. Such a project on Earth would be hard, and humans are wonderful multi-purpose machines, but humanoid robots are not - not yet.

Which is why I would assume that any transportation that is needed early on in the life of Mars colonization will be purpose built on Earth, and shipped to Mars in some compact form that doesn't require complex assembly when it arrives.

Oh, and there will be a LOT of them shipped to Mars, because Elon Musk plans for an ever increasing number of ships to transit each Earth and Mars conjunction.

[BN]

[Twark_Main]

My favorite fact about the LRV is that (for reasons that should be obvious) it's one of the few electric cars ever made that uses primary cells.  It was never intended to be charged up again, and non-rechargeable batteries achieved lower weight and could better withstand the extreme environment.

[BN]

a similar, compact "MRV" is a reasonable solution for initial mars logistics imo. although this time with rechargeable batteries and solar panels.

as usual, the primary design constraint is weight and the LRV was a great design in that regard at 210kg.


my favorite detail would have to be the story of them repairing the fender with tape and a map.

[AmigaClone]

I can see several vehicles being used for travel on Mars itself.

Initially, a modernized version of the LRV might be a good option for short (single EVA) trips.

Longer trips would use a larger vehicle that could still be sent to Mars on a single Starship without the need for major reassembly once there. That vehicle would not only serve as transport, but also serve as a mobile base. One of the possible inspirations for this larger vehicle could be a pure electric version of the "Antarctic Snow Cruiser". Another could be "Arc II" from the 1976 American TV series by the same name.

[BN]

I can see several vehicles being used for travel on Mars itself.

Initially, a modernized version of the LRV might be a good option for short (single EVA) trips.

Longer trips would use a larger vehicle that could still be sent to Mars on a single Starship without the need for major reassembly once there. That vehicle would not only serve as transport, but also serve as a mobile base. One of the possible inspirations for this larger vehicle could be a pure electric version of the "Antarctic Snow Cruiser". Another could be "Arc II" from the 1976 American TV series by the same name.

this is the approach being taken for Artemis. they have granted contracts for several open MRV style vehicles, but also JAXA/Toyota is developing a pressurized vehicle.

[DanClemmensen]

Why not just go full 6-axis machine then. Just put a laser on an arm somewhere inside the Starship? Have little wheeled robots carry and stack. Cut out enough and the Starship turns into a factory space. Other robot arms hold, bend and weld. Like a mini Tesla factory.

I assumed general-purpose robot hardware because it can be used for other tasks in addition to Ship dissassembly and rover chassis building.

Except that general purpose humanoid robots today can't do any of that. Or I should say, have not shown the ability to do that in applications here on Earth. And if they can't do it here on Earth, then doing it on Mars will be a lot harder.

I refer to the hardware, not to the "AI" software, which I agree is sketchy. For the specific cut and weld application I propose, the hardware would be programmed to configure itself as a 6-axis CNC cutter, and that CNC cutter would then be programmed to perform a very specific set of steps. The hardware will reconfigure, move, and then perform another specific set of cuts, etc. This is not some weird robotic dancer or gymnast. The entire sequence can be practiced on Earth before the Mars mission.

I believe two general-purpose robot chassis can do the pre-programmed dissasembly.

I see the same irrational exuberance around humanoid robots as I do with AI software these days. Until you actually SEE a humanoid robot demonstrating IN REAL LIFE APPLICATIONS the tasks you want them to do on Mars, they can't yet do it.

agreed. I have never seen humanoid robotic hardware programmed to perform simple CNC operations. I suspect is has been done, but it's not sexy enough to make YouTube videos.

For instance, I own a Tesla Model Y, but I have NEVER believed anything Elon Musk has said about Full Self Driving (FSD). He has been promising it was right around the corner since 2018, and it still isn't here (I've tried it, and see no reason to buy it).

I have been driving my Model Y since Q2 2020. I have never used autopilot or FSD, even when FSD was offered for free trial. These features are too complicated to be trusted. They are also irrelevant to the use of humanoid robot hardware on Mars. The specific reuse of a specific Starship to create specific set of rover chassis is a highly restricted pre-planned activity in a highly restricted  workspace with no unknown or time-critical inputs.

And it is the same with the Tesla Optimus robot. I've been following the end-effector field for humanoid robots since I was in college, and while dancing and running robots abound, using humanoid robots for general purpose tasks has not happened yet. Why? Because the combination of abilities to do dextrous detailed work, quickly, has not been realized yet.

Which is why Lampyridae's suggestion of task-specific equipment is a good one.

Two, because the winching step works better with one at the top and one at the bottom. We are probably power-limited, so multiple parallel specialized robots will not help much, and we don't need a high-production factory to disassemble one Ship and build only the number of rovers that consume one Ship's worth of steel.

Time is a factor here, from the standpoint of when you start and when a rover is needed. In other words, if this turns out to be a 10-year project, then it probably is not worth the effort. And modern planning systems today could estimate how many man-hours it would take to do this project, and then you would multiply by some X-factor for how much less capable humanoid robots are in doing the same tasks.

Required hardware:
    two humanoid robots
    two fiber laser cutter/welders (optimized for Mars)
    one winch with 50 meters of cable
    one pulley
You of course still need all the manufactured parts of your rovers other than the chassis and wheels.
   The fiber laser cutter/welders are probably around 2000 Watts. They must be optimized for Mars because the ones we use on Earth are air or water cooled. Welding will not need the Argon used on Earth.

My gut tells me you are seriously under-resourcing this effort, and not taking into account equipment failures and the time it will take overall for this project.

So if the goal is to land one ship, and have one or more land vehicles produced by the time the next ship arrives in 2 years, I doubt this will work. Such a project on Earth would be hard, and humans are wonderful multi-purpose machines, but humanoid robots are not - not yet.

Your gut feeling is at least as valid as mine, but we will need to do some actual experiments to find out. I think maybe a day to set up, a day to cut open the hatchway and set up the hoist, and then two days for each chassis. My mental model draws more from Mad Max, Junkyard Wars, and First robotics than it does from Curiosity or Perserverence.

[Twark_Main]

I have been driving my Model Y since Q2 2020. I have never used autopilot or FSD, even when FSD was offered for free trial. These features are too complicated to be trusted.

This one is gonna age like milk.

"640K of memory should be enough for anybody."

[Coastal Ron]

I have been driving my Model Y since Q2 2020. I have never used autopilot or FSD, even when FSD was offered for free trial. These features are too complicated to be trusted.

This one is gonna age like milk.

"640K of memory should be enough for anybody."

If you haven't driven a Tesla with FSD (i.e. Full Self Driving), then you wouldn't know... 

The way I like to describe FSD, which I last used in 2024, is that it is a like a nervous teenage learning how to drive. In other words, it requires far more effort to use FSD than it does to drive the car myself. I do use Adaptive Cruise Control while on the freeway, but only while already in traffic, since it can't see stopped traffic far enough in advance to slow down from freeway speeds. The lack of processing power, the lack of better sensors, and other issues limit the safety of the current FSD.

The reason I raised the issue of Tesla and their current Full Self Driving software is that it represents the height of AI development for Tesla. They have the most training data for FSD, the most users, the most experience in production environments, etc. The Tesla Optimus robot is still literally in its infancy, without any large scale deployments that improve on anything humans can do.

For Mars, where moving around won't need to be fast, I think autonomous vehicles will be prevalent, but I also think that manual control will always be an option. And once remote sites are set up, with a need for constant movement of cargo and people, then I think that is a good use for autonomous road transportation systems.

[Twark_Main]

I have been driving my Model Y since Q2 2020. I have never used autopilot or FSD, even when FSD was offered for free trial. These features are too complicated to be trusted.

This one is gonna age like milk.

"640K of memory should be enough for anybody."

...FSD, which I last used in 2024...

With the rate of progress, this is like the (apocryphal) IBM exec adding... "and I should know, I used a computer as recently as 1973!"   

[Coastal Ron]

I have been driving my Model Y since Q2 2020. I have never used autopilot or FSD, even when FSD was offered for free trial. These features are too complicated to be trusted.

This one is gonna age like milk.

"640K of memory should be enough for anybody."

...FSD, which I last used in 2024...

With the rate of progress, this is like the (apocryphal) IBM exec adding... "and I should know, I used a computer as recently as 1973!"   

FSD is HARDWARE dependent, which means that back in 2018 Elon Musk was promising FSD using Hardware 2 that existed in their production cars, then said it would really work with Hardware 3 (which is what I have in my 2021 Model Y), and now he says FSD will FINALLY work as advertised using Hardware 4. Without any major changes to the sensors (and actually deactivated any existing ultrasonic sensors).

That isn't "progress", that is a lack of real understanding by Elon Musk about what it takes to create a Full Self Driving feature that works as advertised. After more than 6 years!

And now people like you are drinking the Elon PR, thinking that autonomous driving is just a software update away. You are funny 

[Twark_Main]

I have been driving my Model Y since Q2 2020. I have never used autopilot or FSD, even when FSD was offered for free trial. These features are too complicated to be trusted.

This one is gonna age like milk.

"640K of memory should be enough for anybody."

...FSD, which I last used in 2024...

With the rate of progress, this is like the (apocryphal) IBM exec adding... "and I should know, I used a computer as recently as 1973!"   

FSD is HARDWARE dependent, which means that back in 2018 Elon Musk was promising FSD using Hardware 2 that existed in their production cars, then said it would really work with Hardware 3 (which is what I have in my 2021 Model Y), and now he says FSD will FINALLY work as advertised using Hardware 4. Without any major changes to the sensors (and actually deactivated any existing ultrasonic sensors).

That isn't "progress", that is a lack of real understanding by Elon Musk about what it takes to create a Full Self Driving feature that works as advertised. After more than 6 years!

And now people like you are drinking the Elon PR, thinking that autonomous driving is just a software update away. You are funny 

This is getting way off-topic, but obviously Tesla built the computer as a modular replaceable unit so it can be upgraded if necessary.  It may be necessary.     I expect the AI can be tweaked to use the existing cameras however, but we shall see how it ultimately turns out.  Swapping out cameras is a few grand in labor but ultimately doable.

I think, for the thread moving forward, it's okay to assume that FSD-type capabilities will or will not be available on Mars. Just disclose what you are assuming.  Further discussion is too off-topic, I expect.

[BN]

I have never used autopilot or FSD, even when FSD was offered for free trial. These features are too complicated to be trusted.

I am absolutely blown away by this lol.

[TheRadicalModerate]

This is my general concept.

    1. Cover the surface with a thin membrane, burying the perimeter.

How far away is the perimeter?  How far down do you have to go to get under the water deposit?

    2. Pull a vacuum (these two steps are already proven with vacuum surcharging on Earth).

    3. The ice underneath sublimates at the lower pressure.

If you pull a vacuum, then the thin membrane coats the surface of the ice.  I don't know enough about the thermodynamics of a solid covered by a membrane, but ISTM that the effective pressure will be atmospheric pressure--which is usually a couple of pascals above the triple point pressure.  So I think you're not subliming a lot of ice without lots of heat.

    4. Re-deposit the (now clean) ice in a collection vessel.

    5. Recycle the heat of deposition back under the membrane, so it's used to sublimate more ice. Lots of heat in that phase change!

You still need a heat pump to do this.  Nothing wrong with recycling process heat, but it might be better to have less of it, not more.

    6. Optionally you might expose ice by "gardening" with heavy equipment or blasting, make the membrane a solar collector (80% vs 25% efficient), or selectively insulate to reduce heat loss.

We obviously don't know very much about the quality of the ice under the surface.  Is it mixed with soils, or is it relatively pure?  Is it a vast expanse, with tens of thousands of m³, or is it patchier?  How deep is the deposit?  Tens or hundreds of meters?  There are a lot of variables

Fortunately this is very short range movement of water vapor (as mentioned above), so it does work, but I don't know if it makes sense as a method of bulk water transport much beyond that.  Compared to a conventional water pipe it has extremely low fluid density, which means extremely high pipe mass and pumping power for a given mass flow rate. 

I assume you're thinking only of extremely high scale mining, on extremely large water deposits.  For this to work, you have to be able not only to stake off the area you're going to mine, but also somehow seal the area you want to mine next, so it doesn't sublime away while you're waiting for the equipment to mine it to become available.  At the very least, that involves trenching all the way to the bottom of the deposit, and constructing some kind of vapor-retaining wall.

If you have a really high quality deposit, it might make more sense to use underground mining techniques, where you can continue to the pressure of the overtopping regolith to keep thinks stable, while cutting galleries into the ice, chewing it up, and sending it to a hopper for transport to whatever refining you need to do.

But this is all colonial-scale mining.  I'm more interested in base-scale extraction to begin with.  That requires ~1000t of prop every 2.14y (for one return flight per synod), plus, say, maybe 100t a year for base use (assuming no water-intensive industrial processes, at least to begin with).  That's about 100t of LCH4 per year, which requires 25t of hydrogen, which is 225t/y of water.  Note that pure Sabatier reactions yield O:F=2:1, so you need some other way to lean the mixture down to 3.6:1.  You can do that with RWGS, using recyclable hydrogen as a catalyst to generate excess O2, or you can simply supply more water.  Too lazy to do the math on how much more water--say about double?  That would make prop requirements 550t/y.  Say 700t/y for all base ops.  That's roughly 2t/day.