For $150 billion, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration could have sent astronauts back to the Moon. The Obama administration judged that too expensive, and in September, Congress agreed to cancel the program.
For a fraction of that — less than $200 million, along with about $250 million for a rocket — NASA engineers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston say they can safely send a humanoid robot to the Moon. And they say they could accomplish that in a thousand days…
Despite the sophistication of the project, the robot’s capabilities would be slight compared with what a human could do on the lunar surface. Project M was conceived as a technology demonstration, not a scientific mission.
One of the main tasks envisioned for the robot would be to simply pick up a rock and drop it, as part of an education program broadcast to schools. Students could do the same and compare the relative gravity of Earth.
I want to make this clear: I’m 100% on board with the idea of sending humanoid robots into space, especially if they look like C3PO, as the Times’ rendering does.
But it’s downright pathetic that we can’t get actual humans back to the moon at a less-than-prohibitive cost. We sent people to the moon in 1969! Before personal computers and CDs and the Internet and Segways.
I was told there’d be moon colonies by now; I thought that was what the Biosphere was about. Ridiculous.
Now we’re reduced to sending robots to the moon so they can pick up a rock and drop it. It’s embarrassing for us and it’s embarrassing for the robots. The Terminator would be humiliated if he lived to see this.
Tedquarters 
I wouldnt think it would be to hard to put a robot on the moon. How many rovers have we sent to Mars? Which is much much more difficult than getting to the moon. You’d think something like sending robots to the moon would be like second nature at this point.
“Sending a robot to the Moon is far easier than sending a person. For one, a robot does not need air or food. And there is no return trip”
is it just me that finds that last sentence ominous?
In 2009, NASA held a symposium on project costs which presented an estimate of the Apollo program costs in 2005 dollars as roughly $170 billion. This included all research and development costs; the procurement of 15 Saturn V rockets, 16 Command/Service Modules, 12 Lunar Modules, plus program support and management costs; construction expenses for facilities and their upgrading, and costs for flight operations.
I think everyone knows that someday when the robots attack humanity it will be from the moon. Clearly a given. But why let the Robots spend extra time setting up their moonbase? No, lets just do the hard part for them and cut years off their plans. NASA has sided with the robots – everybody remember that when the day comes.
I mean, geez people, movies have been warning us about this for years.