By Request: Space Flight
Max asks about the great beyond:
I, sir, would like to now what your issue with the space program. And by issue, I mean, what exactly are you beefing about? NASA itself? Launching people into space in general? The ‘no waste’ argument of black boxing the solar system (already done, actually)? The argument that the money could be spent on other expensive science projects (known as ‘we could fund MY project with that money instead’ argument)?
The first place to start is that, of course, we have two different space programs — one military and one civilian. The existence of some sort of military concern with outer space is natural for a great power, but this is an area in which we tend to go too far. Instead of agreeing to abide by and help enforce the existing international law on the demilitarization of space, the United States has in recent years been pushing the envelop toward the militarization of space complete with a Bush administration National Space Strategy that sets perpetual military hegemony in space as a national goal. The upshot of this sort of policymaking is to help create a self-justifying “space arms race” with the Chinese in which Chinese responses to our moves become the justification for further moves that lead to further Chinese responses and further moves. It’s bad for you, it’s bad for me, it’s bad for the world, but it’s good for the aerospace industry.
Then you have the civilian space program for science and exploration purposes. This is a fine idea. My only beef with it is that the program has been disproportionately focused on the idea of manned space exploration. Human beings, being fragile creates who evolved on the planet earth, turn out to be hard to send into space. They also, being humans, tend not to be interested in taking extremely long trips even though many interesting things in space are very far away. Under the circumstances, it’s just not very practical to send human beings into space unless there’s something important that only human beings can do. And in recent decades, there just having been the sort of compelling projects that justify the difficulties of manned space flight. Instead, we’ve been making up missions — most recently the preposterous idea of a manned mission to Mars — in order to justify the human-oriented space program.
But what we ought to do is leave the manned space flight to eccentric billionaires looking to do something weird, and focus our civilian space activities on doing science and exploration through unmanned probes and telescopes and the like. There’s lots of perfectly legitimate things for NASA to be doing, including sending vehicles to other planets to tell us more about them and establishing better systems for tracking (and better understanding) the asteroids and comets that are flying around.
64 Responses to “By Request: Space Flight”
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January 3rd, 2009 at 8:50 am
Eccentric billionaires take forever to get things done! Did they ever get a hot-air balloon to circumnavigate the globe? How are they going to get to Mars?
January 3rd, 2009 at 8:54 am
I agree. When we lose a mars lander, it’s a couple of hundred million dollars and a speed bump in the program. When we lose a space shuttle full of people, it’s a national tragedy and shuts down the program for a while. 5 years now for the mars landers is amazing, useful, and fairly cheap. The proposed manned Mars mission was a political stunt.
(FYI, a typo: I think “there just having been” should have been “there just haven’t been.”)
January 3rd, 2009 at 8:58 am
“I, sir, would like to now what your issue with the space program.”
Matt is just opposed to humans riding around in vehicles which aren’t human powered.
If people could go into space via bicycles or rickshaws, he’d be just fine with it. But machine powered travel, whether terrestrial or extra-terrestrial just upsets his delicate sensibilities.
(There is also the issue that NASA vehicles are manufactured in America, which is against his “no manufacturing in America” stance.)
January 3rd, 2009 at 8:59 am
I think MY has some good points in this post, especially about the militarization of space and the manned flights. We should be letting the X-prizes do the manned stuff, although I’d like to see some government funding for studying long-term/permanent space settlements. The theories would be nice to have before that asteroid wipes out everything but the cockroaches.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:05 am
Petey, you missed a point here: Matt wants to reserve space travel for TFSBs.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:08 am
I’ve lost the ability to tell if Petey is being sarcastic or stupid.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:11 am
“Petey, you missed a point here: Matt wants to reserve space travel for TFSBs.”
I don’t think Matt is discriminating against self-made rich folks here. He generally seeks advantage for all rich folks, whether their riches come from family money like his does or not.
But I don’t think that’s the main point here. His jihad against any American jobs that aren’t in the service industry is more of what motivates him on issues like this.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:15 am
I think it was stupid, but my sarcasm detector’s been broken for a while.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:22 am
Remember when Petey was all about John Edwards? Guy was militant about him. That was funny. Petey is silly.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:36 am
Matt wants to send good American jobs to other planets.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:42 am
Or maybe he just wants to give them away to ALIENS!!
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:04 am
I’ve always liked the space program because of the other benefits that come out of its research. I like manned space flight because it leads to research into ecology, which is an area of scientific inquiry that needs a lot more attention. Space is just the excuse, not the goal, for me.
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:25 am
I am all in favor of more and better unmanned exploration; in fact I would like to see our unmanned budget increased by 10x and some assembly-line techniques used to get a large number of probes in motion – more results and less damage from individual failures.
But it is ridiculous to think that unmanned probes can do everything that manned exploration can do. This was clearly illustrated on the Apollo missions where various pieces of geological survey and sampling equipment failed or did not perform as designed, but the astronauts on-site were able to fix or work around most of the failures and get the results. When the core sampling drill torqued out an unmanned probe would have just blown a fuse and quit; the on-site astronauts extended the handles and applied brute human torque until they pulled the core sample clear. Similarly the very well-designed and high-performing Mars rovers (which have exceeded all expectations) are dead/dying due to build-up of dust on the solar panels; an astronaut with a pack of Handi-wipes could fix that in 10 minutes.
I don’t know what the understanding of automation and robotics among the commentariat is, but we are no way no how anywhere near building robots with the ability to fix unexpected problems and repair unanticipated failures inside themselves that many here seem to think.
All that said, like everything else W has touched the existing structure of NASA, and particularly its manned division, is a disaster.
Cranky
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:33 am
Matt – there are hundreds of thousands of things that humans can do that robots cannot. Additionally, solving the problem of how to get the human to Mars (for example) to do those things massively expands our knowledge of ourselves and our solar system while pushing the limit of our engineering capabilities.
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:53 am
Matt, I wonder if you could expand upon why a manned mission to Mars is “preposterous”. I don’t see how something being dangerous, difficult, expensive, or something you would not do personally makes it preposterous.
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:59 am
Wait, couldn’t our own Richard Steven Hack help us with our space exploration program, given that he keeps reminding us that soon he’s going to be some sort of advanced cyber-humanoid?
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:05 am
The only thing I object to in this post is the characterization of billionaires who fly into space as “eccentric.” Thrill-seeking, maybe. But to me they seem to have their priorities just right.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:08 am
Don’t forget (or consider yourself told) that the second letter in NASA is for aeronautics — NASA research in this area has been very productive in air traffic control and management (work that is on going), vehicle and engine design (the big round high bypass engines one sees on commercial aircraft now represent an outcome from NASA research, initially aimed at energy efficiency but also having payoffs in noise reduction), and fundamental aeronautics. Some past research in very high speed aircraft (for commercial application) has been less successful, for a variety of reasons.
http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:12 am
A trained human geologist could travel the same distance, gather the same information & perform the same work in a day that both of the Mars rovers combined can do in a week, or more.
Just saying, as others have, that while robotics can be good, they’re still not great. If your objective is scientific discovery rather than cost minimisation, it’s delusional to think either one could completely replace the other & equally far-fetched to think the scientific community can be expected to rely on private enterprise to fill the gap. The answer is a synergistic relationship between robotics & humans, as it always has been, but it’s only now that robotics are catching up sufficiently in abilties to fulfil their end of the bargain.
Space telescopes & ground probes simply can’t be compared on an apples for apples basis. Space telescopes can be controlled with minimal communications delays, greatly expand our capabilities but are (relatively speaking) just next door & only require periodic manned servicing. Ground-pounding extraterrestrial probes, on the other hand, function more like the proverbial blind man describing the shape of an elephant & fail due to the inexorable build-up of individually minor mechanical problems. Good, but not great.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:13 am
The two Mars rovers are coming up on their fifth anniversary, Hubble has aided huge steps forward in applied and theoretical physics, the NGST (West) telescope promises more, the earth-trained satellites NASA operates provide data on everything from weather to fire and crops to bugs, Matt’s iPhone uses NASA data, and there is much that is collected and just sits. There is plenty to be done without people while we get the our part of this world back on track.
The Mars mission is preposterous because George Bush proposed it, We have to go somewhere else first.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:30 am
Bush never proposed a “Mars mission” as such really, as much as people love to latch onto it as a typical Bushian boondoggle. Mars was always a vaguely defined light at the end of the tunnel, in recognition of its long-standing attraction for eventual human exploration. Retiring the Shuttle & returning to the Moon was the objective which was given strict dates & timelines to be completed by in Bush’s directives. The idea was a manned return to the Moon serve as a testbed for engineering & procedures that would be needed for eventual, unscheduled manned missions to Mars.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:32 am
Pardon? There was a poll a few years back that found that a majority of Americans would be interested in going to Mars even if they knew that the trip would be one-way.
Trust me, shortage of volunteers is not going to be a problem.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:35 am
Below is a quote from physicist Bob Park, a strenuous critic of manned space flight.
3. NASA REGRESSION: THE TRANSITION IS NOT GOING SMOOTHLY.
NASA is a thorny problem for Obama. NASA administrator Mike Griffin is focused on the Constellation program, the much delayed, way-over-budget and thoroughly useless moon rocket, which seems to be the U.S. entry in a space-race with emerging nations. The Orlando Sentinel reports a squabble between Griffin and Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator for policy, who heads the Obama NASA-transition-team. Griffin says she’s unqualified. She has no background in science or technology. It’s past time for a complete restructuring of NASA focusing on the future, not the past. Cede the Moon to China and the ISS to India. Space ships, along with sailing ships and covered wagons, are relics of bygone eras. There’s a universe out there to learn about, let’s get on with it.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:38 am
Shorter Matt: Let’s sit here on Earth and rot!
More seriously, this is kind of funny:
They also, being humans, tend not to be interested in taking extremely long trips
Why yes, that’s why NASA has no end of volunteers for these trips. And, if true, humanity would still be wandering around Africa. Too “long” to go anywhere else, God knows.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:42 am
But Matt, if we don’t have manned (peopled, actually) missions, we’ll have to have robotic ones. And you know what that means — it will hasten the day our robotic servants rise to become our robotic overlords (the ones in space will have already gotten the “rise” and “over” parts out of the way).
Eric@14: I suspect getting robots capable of handling some of those “hundreds of thousands of things” that humans can do in space that robots cannot would advance our engineering faster. On the flip side, there are lots of things robots can do in space that humans cannot — the Mars Rovers, for example, have been operating for years past their planned mission. Achieving the same thing with humans would be considerably more expensive.
Freeman Dyson pointed out years ago that the value of the science done in space is almost inversely proportioned to the cost of the mission. I think Hubble was a possible exception (though a few years later Hubble began to be rivaled by adaptive-optics telescopes at a fraction of the cost — one of the few successes of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars).
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:47 am
Bush never proposed a “Mars mission” as such Agreed, but only because he couldn’t pronounce it. Just kidding. Again. The point is simply that there is plenty to do without sending humans to space and the training time and money might find better uses on earth, at least for the next little while.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:47 am
The reason that manned missions to Mars are “preposterous” is that they’d be extremely expensive, while offering little to no practical benefit.
Suppose an American president went on TV to announce that our new top scientific priority was to establish permanent colonies at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and that we’d be spending hundreds of billions of dollars in an attempt to do so. I think most people would have a few doubts – not only about the plan itself, but possibly about the president’s sanity.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:50 am
The average American pays 15c per day for the entirety of NASA. I think we need to clearly define what we mean by “expensive” here.
Secondly, unmanned & manned budgets have historically risen in concert with, rather than in opposition to, one another. Zero out one aspect & the other won’t be flush for very long, of that I’d be willing to bet.
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Sending people into space to explore the extra-terrestrial domain is only slightly more practical than shrinking people in order to explore the microscopic domain. Telescopes are the tools for space exploration (along with robots, where necessary) and microscopes are the proper tools for exploring the microscopic world. It amazes me that there are so many intelligent people who don’t understand this.
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Shorter Matt: Let’s sit here on Earth and rot!
Right. The choice is between sitting here on Earth and rotting, or finally getting off our asses and going to live on Mars.
Pulling tubes pretty early on a Saturday, aren’t you?
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
One issue that’s always confused me about long-term missions like that proposed for Mars is how exactly the astronaut passengers would survive the ambient radiation. In low earth orbit (like the space station or shuttle), much of the cosmic ray flux, solar wind, etc. is shielded by the Earth’s magnetic field. But this would not be the case for a Mars mission. Has there been discussion of how to shield the passengers from this radiation? It doesn’t appear feasible to launch a vehicle with sufficiently thick walls.
I’m not trying to be sarcastic or anything — I’m genuinely curious.
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I spent the holidays with my parents. Both of whom worked for NASA from the mid 60’s through the 80’s (and the 90’s for my mother). Both were high ranking, and my father directed the Viking Project (first unmanned missions to Mars) as well as headed up a study for the first permanent Space Colony. My mother spent much of her career working on Space Station, and they both worked on the Apollo missions (both were part of the small team that were the very first to analyze lunar samples in th 60’s). IE, they had quite a bit of experience with both manned and unmanned projects at pretty high levels.
Just two days ago, they got into the whole manned vs. unmanned debate. My father called the decision to put emphasis on manned missions “the first folly of Texas” or something like that (referring to the powers that be at the Johnson Space Center in Houston). Needless to say that despite how good such projects were for his career, he really thought the emphasis on manned missions was, for the most part, a waste of time and resources compared to what could have been done with a more unmanned-centric policy (especially in terms of pure science).
I brought up the manned Mission to Mars with my dad and he sort of laughed at the whole idea. He didn’t go into details, but needless to say, he doesn’t take the whole thing very seriously at all, nor gives it much respect. Matt’s use of the word preposterous would do well-enough summing up my father’s thoughts on the project.
In other words, what Matt is saying jives pretty well with the conversation I just heard 2 days ago between two former high ranking NASA officials with a collective 60-70 years of experience between them.
January 3rd, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Has there been discussion of how to shield the passengers from this radiation? It doesn’t appear feasible to launch a vehicle with sufficiently thick walls.
When it comes to space exploration schemes, there is quite literally nothing new under the sun. I believe most of the “serious” manned Mars mission proposals address radiation shielding already. (water tanks between the astronauts and the sun, I believe?) Would that work? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure most of the astronaut corps would accept a quintupling of their leukemia odds for the chance to be (Neil Armstrong x 10).
Anyway, where’s R. S. Hack? I was expecting some angry posts about post-singularity Accelerando-style space robots up at the top of the thread.
January 3rd, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Human beings, being fragile creates [sic] who evolved on the planet earth, turn out to be hard to send into space. They also, being humans, tend not to be interested in taking extremely long trips even though many interesting things in space are very far away.
LEt me rephrase: “Human beings, being fragile creatures who evolved on land, turn out to be hard to send onto the ocean. They also, being humans, tend not to be interested in taking extrememly long trips even though many interestin things oversseas are very far away.”
Sorry Columbus, Magellan, Cook, Polo, and de Leon, Matt Yglesias has cancelled your plans.
January 3rd, 2009 at 1:51 pm
That’s ridiculous, Gspng. Columbus and company had plans with cash benefits in mind (except for Cook, who came centuries later). Columbus might have been wrong about the size of the planet, but he was accidentally right that there was profit to be made by sailing west. Magellan’s expedition turned a small profit thanks to the spices his surviving ship brought back. The reason their expeditions are historically significant is because there was real economic benefit to using the routes they pioneered.
If there’s a convincing case for manned exploration of space, I haven’t heard it yet. Maybe in a century or so when we have better propulsion technologies. But with the chemical rockets we have now, deep space exploration isn’t worth it except for science, and the machines are much more cost-effective for that. Earth orbit might be worthwhile if someone develops a zero-G manufacturing killer app, but so close to home you might as well run things by telepresence rather than put humans up there, except occasionally as mechanics.
January 3rd, 2009 at 2:01 pm
what we ought to do is leave the manned space flight to eccentric billionaires looking to do something weird
I don’t think billionaires who want to go into space are necessarily eccentrics looking to do something weird. Going into space isn’t “weird,” it’s awesome! It would be infinitely more awesome if NASA actually sent people in outer space, as opposed to just really really high. Did you know the space shuttle doesn’t leave the Earth’s atmosphere?! But still, if I had an assload of money I didn’t know what to do with, I could easily see using it for a trip on a space shuttle.
January 3rd, 2009 at 3:03 pm
One issue that’s always confused me about long-term missions like that proposed for Mars is how exactly the astronaut passengers would survive the ambient radiation. In low earth orbit (like the space station or shuttle), much of the cosmic ray flux, solar wind, etc. is shielded by the Earth’s magnetic field.
My understanding is that the effect of human exposure to cosmic rays has been thouroughly examined. After exposure, humans have a one in four chance of (1) being able to infinitely reshape their body as if it were elastic, (2) being able to become invisible at will, (3) being able to insantly burst into flame, fly, and project heat/flame, or (4) transform into a orange, rocky-skinned misanthrope with incredible strength. Fantastic? ‘Nuff said!
January 3rd, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Matt, manned spaceflight for its own sake is a worthwhile investment. Space is one of the few areas where we see meaningful global cooperation, e.g. the International Space Station. This should be expanded, first by inviting the Chinese and Indians to join the project, then by working together with the Europeans, Russians and Japanese on a moon programme. The French, at least, are jumping up and down at the chance of a global mission to the moon and mars. The first flag planted on another planet should be that of the United Nations.
January 3rd, 2009 at 4:17 pm
nanne sez:
Matt, manned spaceflight for its own sake is a worthwhile investment. Space is one of the few areas where we see meaningful global cooperation, e.g. the International Space Station. This should be expanded, first by inviting the Chinese and Indians to join the project, then by working together with the Europeans, Russians and Japanese on a moon programme. The French, at least, are jumping up and down at the chance of a global mission to the moon and mars. The first flag planted on another planet should be that of the United Nations.
I agree, and I think the broader question here is “what are we looking to get from our manned spaceflight activities. Matt’s assumption seems to be that we’re only interested in scientific data. That’s not inherently an incorrect premise, but neither is it one that’s universally agreed on.
In addition to the political usefulness nanne mentions, manned space activities right now give us the chance to learn more about human physiology and how it adapts to free-fall environments. At some point technological progress will lower the cost of manned spaceflight to the point where large-scale space travel and settlement become economically worthwhile activities, and it’ll be useful at that point to have already gained some knowledge and expertise in how to live in space.
(I’m not claiming that our current manned program fills that objective well.)
January 3rd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Adam Smith,
Similarly, it is a great idea to use manned missions for the deep exploration of volcanoes. Think how intstructive it would be to find out the effects of hot magma on human physiology.
January 3rd, 2009 at 7:01 pm
This old chestnut clearly needs a re-visit:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34138
January 3rd, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Oh, please. If you purposefully fail to see the qualitative difference between scientific capacity & scientific interest, then there’s no hope for you.
January 3rd, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Robert Zubrin, I think, wrote a fun book called “Mission to Mars” maybe 10 years ago or so. It basically discussed how to send people to mars using off-the-shelf parts, without costing that much (relative to other government programs, I’m guessing).
It’s quite an interesting read, and discusses the radiation problem mentioned above. I think it had to do with using water as a radiation shield, which would also be useful for drinking (recycled waste would go back into the tanks).
Once again, we need an X-prize for this sort of thing!
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:04 pm
There is absolutely no reason to care about the effect of zero gravity on human physiology unless it is because you want to go about the idiotic project of sending people into space (idiotic with today’s technology; 100 years from now, maybe not, but who cares?). There is no intrinsic scientific interest in zero g on people.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:18 pm
@ 35.AlanC9: If 34.Gspng’s use of Columbus was not a good example, the Hawaiians sure are.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:32 pm
To be fair, though, *on* the ocean is quite a bit different than *in* the ocean, the latter of which is more akin to spaceflight – and about as difficult. Yuri Gagarin did his first orbit only a year after the first human reached the bottom of the Marianas trench. And furthermore, no submersible currently exists that can repeat this.
January 3rd, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Yeah, I’d say it’s pretty different – people can cross the oceans in rowboats, for Pete’s sake.
As such, analogies between historic terrestrial exploration and future extraterrestrial exploration are generally pretty absurd. Let me know when we figure out a way to reach Mars via rafts or dogsleds.
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:20 pm
AlanC9 makes an interesting, but I think unconvincing point. Sure Columbus and the others had financial benefit in mind. But can he imagine no potential financial benefit from manned space exploration? In fact, he suggests that deep space exploration is of no current use “except for science.” Yeah, what good is science? Further, he says he might be supportive of manned space flight when we have better propulsion systems. But how are we to get those systems without the public support for the R&D? And to get the public’s support we need to inspire it. Current manned spaceflight does that.
And is the idea of exploration for exploration’s sake so awful? Is inspiration just an extravagance? The moon landing changed people. I remember the amount of attention given to shuttle missions. There was joy, pride, and interest in science. We don’t see that kind of scientific support very often. I see nothing wrong with fostering it with manned space flight.
January 4th, 2009 at 12:05 am
One more thing. My original comment was a reaction to Matt’s arguments, and he did not mention the lack of economic value to manned space flight. What he said was that humans were unsuited to space flight and that they don’t want to go away for a long time. Both of these are directly comparable to the ocean explorers of old. Maybe you think economics are the be-all and end-all of the discussion (obviously I do not), but if that is the argument, make it. Don’t fall back on “we are weak and don’t really want to go,” because if those were dispositive regardless of economics, Columbus et al. would not have gone.
January 4th, 2009 at 2:11 am
Dude, aren’t you an American?
Isn’t your whole civilization based upon people who were interested in taking a “very long trip” to a place “very far away”?
Whether that be the Pilgrims or Ellis Island, or the Oregon trail, the very existence of American belies this premise.
——-
January 4th, 2009 at 2:51 am
There is plenty to be done without people while we get the our part of this world back on track.
I’d love to know who started this meme, because I’ve never seen a debate about the manned space program in which someone didn’t imply that humanity’s failure to cure cancer, end poverty, and feed the hungry was directly related to the $10-20 billion we spend on it annually.
George Bush came up with two ideas that would cost at least a trillion dollars to accomplish – his “Mission to Mars” and the Iraq war. Who wants to argue that we wouldn’t have been better off if he’d sent someone to plant a flag on Olympus Mons instead of choosing the idea Matt supported?
January 4th, 2009 at 8:02 am
A note on “militarization” of space: 50 years ago many assumed that space would develop along the lines of military aviation from 1910 on — reconnaissance and surveillance, fighters, bombers, dogfights & all that.
In the event, it has been important only for surveillance, communications, and navigation. Why? For the same reason that only weather/remote sensing, commsats, and navsats have paid for themselves in civilian uses: relatively small satellites can gather and relay lots of information, its benefits spread over many users, with no need for life support systems, resupply, or survivable return to earth.
As soon as you start talking about big, high-powered, and/or manned stuff — from Dyna-Soar 50 years ago, through SDI “battle stations,” to today’s PowerPoints about zooming special forces to trouble spots anywhere in 45 minutes — you run into stubbornly high launch costs. Do the math, and ground-based toys always provide more bang/buck. You also run into an awkward symmetry of space as “high ground”: anything in orbit which could target anything on earth is also a highly visible and predictable target from anywhere on earth.
Bottom line: where information is concerned, space was “militarized” by the early 1960s, and not much has changed since then. Where actual attack and defense are concerned — blowing stuff up or defending against same — space hasn’t made much difference, won’t for the foreseeable future, and shouldn’t be high on a progresssive’s worry list.
January 4th, 2009 at 8:33 am
The basic point is that manned space exploration is expensive and when it fails people die. Even accepting that humans do some things better than machine, the cost of making space travel safe for people is so high that the engineers and scientists building the systems for humans could have built an awful lot of robots.
We know alot more about the solar system than we did when I was an undergraduate. We learned almost all of it from robots.
January 4th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Do the math, and ground-based toys always provide more bang/buck.
How much bang for the buck do you think an ICBM gets?
January 4th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
What Matt says here is more or less what most scientists who work on space missions or use data from space wish would happen. I am in a related field and know lots of planetary scientists and astronomers and most of us endorse this message.
Although a human geologist on Mars could do things faster than a robotic probe, the cost of sending a person to Mars (and getting her back safely) is so much higher than the cost of unmanned missions that the unmanned missions are a much better deal in terms of scientific return per dollar.
Manned spaceflight is mostly useful for inspiration and symbolic flag-planting. Apollo was fantastically successful at both of these, but that was in a Cold War era with different priorities and a more dominant US economic position (so we could afford it).
January 4th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Freefall is toxic. Long-term ISS inhabitants return to earth gravely ill, and require extensive rehab.
Google “space medicine” a bit to start to get the picture.
We could send people to Mars and bring them back with today’s technology — it would be ruinously expensive, but we could — – if we were satisfied to bring back corpses.
And that’s why the idea of a Mars expedition is preposterous –
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