irrational parent
You might run out of local disk space while waiting for whatever is there to transfer. Assuming you are continuing to take more pictures/videos and want to save them until they can be transferred.
I think disk space is cheap as well.
Radiation hard electronics are not.
And you don't have to send everything high quality. But at least some shiny pictures would be nice.
I don't buy that when you can buy 32gb of storage on a card the size of your pinkie nail for under $10.
You're forgetting just how inhospitable space is to consumer grade electronics. If you watch non-live videos from the space station or check out some of their pictures you'll see loads of dead or stuck pixels on the cameras. That's from radiation damaging the components and those are essentially still completely protected by Earth's magnetic field. As you venture beyond LEO the situation gets much worse and an unlucky hit could kill your $10 storage ending your $74 million dollar Moon mission.
I'm not, I assume anything like that will need to be wrapped in sheets of lead. But modern storage densities are so high there's no need to run out.
Lead wrapping thick enough to sufficiently protect against radiation damage is very, very heavy. Beyond LEO, excessive weight is still ridiculously expensive.
That card would be dead (non responsive or short circuited) by the time it made it to Mars. Rough rule of thumb I have heard is add 2 zeros to the cost of every IC for space grade stuff.
Sure but what does it cost for 32gb of space rated, radiation hardened memory?
Maybe even in triplicate for a consensus system!
I've got a quote in front of me right now for a ~1 TB data recorder for just shy of $4 million.
Also keep in mind this isn't even for the highest class parts, this is more in line for something like a NASA Explorers program level [0]. Something you would get for a JWST or an Artemis level of program would be even more $$$
And how reliable will that storage be when it is bombarded with all of the radiation out atmosphere is currently shielding it from