Well, see…there’s this little trait that engineers have where they really like to know exactly what a machine will do in a given set of circumstances. Put that in the context of a multi-hundred million dollar mission.
I played Black & White; interesting, but also infuriating, as I couldn’t get my avatar to do what I wanted. Not good from an engineering standpoint.
“Obsolete”? No. Obsolete implies that it used to be a great idea but is now outmoded.
Manned space missions aren’t outmoded- they’re premature!
Someday, technology may improve to the point where manned space missions are safe, and life support is relatively simple and inexpensive. Right now, that’s not the case.
Right now, manned missions are putting lives at risk for no good reason. I would have no problem with putting astronauts’ lives at risk if I thought it were necessary, if I thought it was the only way to increase our scientific knowledge of space. But when I look at the shuttle disasters, I don’t find myself thinking “Those brave astronauts died for a noble cause.” I find myself wondering, “Were they really doing anything in space that warranted putting their lives at risk?” From the little I’ve seen, it doesn’t appear so.
If it’s NOT essential to put lives at risk, if we can learn just as much through unmanned probes, what’s the point of putting people in space (other than the fact that it’s kinda cool, and makes for good PR)?
Why not use unmanned technology for now, learn as much as we can about space that way, and go back to manned missions once we’ve learned how to do it better?
Protection from cosmic rays requires far too much mass to make long stays in space practical. Nobody sees any practical way around this problem.
A trip to Mars will give the crew a serious dose of radiation.
You don’t learn how to do something by not doing it. The only way to learn to survive in space is to try to survive in space.
Although cosmic rays do pose something of a longer term chronic to spacefarers, it is more specifically the high density of charged particles from the Sun which are emitted during solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME) which are the real hazard to travellers. These masses of (relatively) slow moving particles are intense enough to do massive biological damage. Fortunately, they’re of sufficiently low energy that a reasonable mass of material shielding or a strong electromagnetic field can block the bulk of them. It is currently cost-prohibitive to haul up sufficient mass to clad shielding onto a spacecraft, and generating such a large but well-confined magentic field is beyond current technology, but neither are inconceivable. Shielding against the more energetic extrasolar radiation is virtually impossible with forseeable technology owing to the extremely energetic nature of these particles, but they are significantly more sparse and with advances in medical science the chronic damage done by these could be continuously repaired.
Long term, of course, it makes little sense to haul around all the necessary plumbing and green goo it takes to keep a human being alive, not to mention maintaining hull pressure and simulating gravity; the most practical solution isn’t to build massive Gene Roddenbury-conceived vessels but to modify the travellers to be more robust and require less resources. Ultimately, I suspect, the distinction between mannen and unmanned missions will become blurred, as will that between organic life and “machine life”. In the interim, until such modifications become technologically feasible and socially acceptible, I have to agree with astorian; placing an inordinate emphasis on manned space exploration (or as I like to think of it, crawling about the living room) detracts from the valuable work done by cost-effective unmanned missions. The Shuttle and the ISS could be justified if they somehow advanced the technology of keeping people alive in space; instead, they’re kludged together political compromises that become an end onto themselves.
The Soviets had the right idea with their string of semi-disposable stations; instead of trying to make a one step do-all platform that would be both a political grandstand and a basis for all forseeable exploration efforts, they baby-walked their way through a sequence of stations, learning from mistakes and developing the requisite technology as they went along. NASA had the opportunity to do the same with the Skylab program, but had their legs swept out from under them by the enforced cancellation of Saturn V production. In the post-Apollo era, NASA was built around and exists today primarily to service the ISS and the STS; to admit that either has manifest flaws, or to put significant effort into developing the next generation of spaceflight technology without a strong political mandate from above is to admit to failure…and so we’re told that the Shuttle is still a great system (never mind the compromises, broken promises, and safety failures); we’re told that the ISS is imperative to future exploration efforts, even though it is in a poor orbital inclination for cislunar transit and is unequipped and unsuited to service as a mid-transit supply and refueling depot.
The only real reason to have manned missions right now are as test flights and missions to develop the technology to transport people beyond Earth orbit. There is a benefit to having intelligent, fully autonomous entities on a detached, long-term mission, but given the current state-of-the-art there’s little reason to make this the focus of space exploration at the expense of scientifically valuable and (relatively) low cost unmanned probes. Sending astronauts to Mars is absurdly premature at this point, and developing an Apollo Plus-type capsule to do so is nothing more than a flag-waving boondoggle.
Stranger
That was certainly the case until a couple of years ago. But now the shuttle is on schedule for retirement in 2010, which is also supposed to be the last year for major ISS construction, and NASA plans to pull completely out of ISS by 2016, at which point ISS and shuttle will have been totally de-funded. That’s part of the whole point of the new Exploration Initiative - to dump a very flawed space program and move on to something else.
In fact, the new plan works exactly as you had described - incrementally. Start with a CEV that has the capability of getting to the moon, and then expand capability as you go.
The problem we have now is that the Shuttle is needed to finish ISS construction, for which the U.S. has international commitments, and also to service Hubble, which has serious political demand behind it. But 2010 is a hard limit - the advisory board after the last Shuttle accident recommended that if the Shuttle fly past 2010 it be completely re-certified, and NASA accepted that recommendation. That’s hugely expensive, so NASA basically took that recomendation as an excuse to retire the Shuttle. BUt now the delays in getting the current shuttles back into space have gotten so severe that it’s very unlikely that they’ll be able to finish all the ISS missions by that time.
And, the cost of the Shuttle return to flight has been skyrocketing, eating into other program budgets.
A journey of a thousand light-years starts with the first step. I see no reason why we should not be taking those first steps now.
Humanity must colonise other worlds if it is to survive in the long term. Ice ages, supervolcanoes, meteors… there are a lot of significant risks in staying on Earth. Most people don’t have any problem with putting something aside for their pension or for a rainy day; so too should we have little problem with putting something towards getting us beyond here.
As xtisme said, there are situations where a robot or probe simply can’t do the job. We have a severe problem with the speed of light: sometimes a quick reaction is needed, and you can’t do that if you’re half a light-hour away. What if one of the Mars Rovers found what looked suspiciously like a fossil?
Quartz’s plan for the near term:
Orbital probes, and lots of them, to reconnoitre and survey the solar system.
Landers: Europa, Titan, Mars. Need I say more? Actually, with Titan, I’d suggest something like a dirigible.
Space telescopes: on or in synchronous orbit above the dark side of the moon, so there’s no E-M interference from Earth, and also in low Earth orbit like Hubble. Their purpose: to progress science and help locate new Earths.
A lunar colony. Where better to experiment with living off-planet? And it’s close enough that a rescue attempt can be made in an emergency.
Longer term, we should get to Mars. Not just because it’s Mars, but because there’s lots of iron there and the low gravity will make it easier to get it off Mars while assisting the process of producing it.
First of all, it’s questionable–to the point of near-certainty–that the CEV will be ready by the scheduled Shuttle retirement date. 2012 looks to be the earliest projected date for system deployment, and given the miss-record of NASA in hitting schedules combined with the increasing risk-adverse attitudes, a date closer to 2016 is likely. Second, if NASA is, as claimed, pulling out of the ISS in 2016, that begs the question of why we’re completing the thing at all. It’s badly behind schedule, several signficant modules have been reduced or completely deprecated (including the propulsion module that would have allowed the facility its own station-keeping capability), and it stands to offer essentially nothing once the NASA tap is turned off. Bizarrely, the Russian Space Agency was forced to deorbit Mir–a very functional station which could have been retrofitted for indefinite continued service–in order to focus on the ISS, which has become…a platform that does essentially nothing Mir didn’t at many times the cost.
The problem with NASA isn’t limited to just one system; it’s that NASA is a highly politicized and schizophrenically fractured organization that is simultaneously obtuse to known hazards and risk adverse, resulting in an agency which is wont to do nothing at all when presented with a conflict. This isn’t the adolescent, energetic organization that ran the Mercury and Gemini programs; it isn’t even the larger, more mature and politcally-aware agency that delicately managed Apollo through several near-failures and missteps. This is an entrenched institution with political fiefdoms which is predominantly dedicated to preserving its own existance by pacifying critics and pleasing powerful Congressional interests.
Finally, the CEV isn’t an incremental development program; it’s a modular platform; the difference being that it is being sold as a plug’n’play development for a interplanetary mission. The notion of sticking six people into a CEV capsule–even a stretched version–for a low-energy Hohmann transfer that takes just short of nine months in either direction (plus a fifteen months of layover) is just short of perposterous. CEV is good enough to get into orbit and good enough for a cislunar mission, but inadequte for long duration interplanetary flight; an interplanetary mission will require a completely different, purpose-designed vessel and propulsion system. Selling it as anything else is a confidence job, and at the asking price of ~$100B (for a lunar mission) is egregeous beyond words given that the booster hardware is already-developed, off-the-shelf technology.
To suggest that the Moon is “close enough that a rescue attempt could be made”, belies, I think, the difficulty of getting there with current technology. Any sort of accident–say, a meteorite breach of this hypothetical colony–that could not be dealt with autonomously in the short term is unlikely to allow enough breathing room to launch a rescue. To launch a timely rescue, you have to assume that you have a vessel, or rather, sufficient vessels to transport all occupants, ready to launch and an orbital window that provides immediate insertion. Without a developed and reasonably self-sufficient infrastructure already in place to effect a rescue, escape from catastrophe is unlikely.
This isn’t to say that a Lunar colony is a terrible idea; if there were a blank check for both manned and unmanned exploration I’d be an avowed advocate, for the first reason you suggest. But the fact is that there is a very limited pool of funds for space exploration, and manned space travel absorbs an inordinate amount of it while (currently) producing little in the way of valuable science and at great risk, not only to life (anyone who has the privildge to participate in the astronaut corps should consider it part of the hazards of the job) but to a public which is unwilling to accept risk and loss as part of the development. Given the pittance of funds that NASA receives relative to the achievements they are tasked with performing, a Lunar base has little to offer and at great sacrifice to other good science that could be done.
As for Mars, there is really no economic or technical reason to emphasize it over any other destination. You state the justification, “…but because there’s lots of iron there and the low gravity will make it easier to get it off Mars while assisting the process of producing it”, but in fact there is no dearth of iron or other valuable metals to be found in planetary space that don’t require elevation out of a gravity field at all. Nor does Mars being a planet have much to offer in the way of security; the rarified atmosphere and the lack of a significant magnetosphere offer little in the way of protection from radiation or meteorites, and yet there is enough chemical reactivity and particulate matter to pose the hazards of corrosion and erosion. If it is resources we desire (and it would be a wise move to put space exploration on a sound financial and hopefullly self-sustainting basis), there’s much to be found in near Earth asteroids, and even more in the asteroid belt. If it’s organic (and possibly biological) chemistry we seek, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn offer a much richer and more likely target. Mars is “closer” in the same sense that Joshua Tree’s Hidden Valley is a much easier climb than Yosemite’s El Capitan; but if you don’t have any skill or experience in endurance rock climbing, it’s damn foolishness to make plans to climb either.
Stranger
One hundred years ago, how many people flew on regularly scheduled airline flights around the world?
In 2005 660 million people flew domestically in the US. Just the US. I can’t find numbers for international travel, but it’s easy for me to believe 1 billion passengers are flying around the planet every year. It’s not a stretch for me to believe in another 100-200 years, we could have one billion passengers routinely flying to and from space every year.
Sure, some of those passengers are the same people, flying multiple times, but that’s still a very large portion of humanity. Why are they flying? One could argue you don’t have to. Heck, businessmen don’t really need to fly, do they? They could just teleconference.
Yet people fly. It’s affordable, convenient, and they want to. Flying to space now, might be like flying for most people 100 years ago, but what makes you think it isn’t going to become much more routine, assuming the demand is there?
If we invent a robot that can ski better than a human, does that make human skiing obsolete?
Some things are worth doing precisedly because humans do them. Exploration by humans affects us on an emotional level. We had put landers on the moon for years before men landed there. The Soviets had a rover on the moon. Most people don’t even know that. And of course, we had the moon mapped extensively from Earth for decades before we sent men there.
But it was the footsteps of a man on the surface of the moon that lit our imagination and inspired our children to study science and engineering.
Frontiers are good for a society. Exploration is good for a society. We need to look outwards, to think of things bigger than ourselves. We need heros who take risks on our behalf. We need to understand, at a gut level, that there are things worth taking great risks for.
Robotic exploration excites scientists and pushes the boundaries of knowledge ahead. That’s very important. But children don’t have pictures of the rover engineers on their bedroom walls. They USED to have pictures of Apollo astronauts. During the era of manned exploration, our favorite toys were spacemen and rocketships.
We’re losing a lot by not embracing manned space exploration and challenging ourselves to expand the boundaries of human existence. We run the risk of becoming a culture of navel-gazing, risk averse wimps.
Saturn 5 took 3 days to get there. Humans can survive about 3 days without water. I’m sure we can do better today, especially if facilities are already prepared - unmanned rescue vehicle in Earth orbit, rescue crew takes transport up (or is already in LEO on other tasks), transfers, and is on the way. Anything as bad as a meteorite breach is not going to be survivable - a lunar colony would have to be underground to shield it from radiation. So we’re talking much more minor emergencies - significant equipment failures, for instance.
How we have changed for the worse. Wasn’t it Otto von Lillienthal who said, ‘Sacrifices must be made.’ after an accident?
I don’t think you understand my reasoning. Mars has significant gravity. This will help considerably in the processing of ore - liquid metal will flow downhill, for example - so we won’t have to spend too much effort in developing new processes. There’s also plenty of water and sunlight, from which we can extract hydrogen and oxygen, and rock with which to shield living quarters. And the gravity is sufficiently less that it’s much easier to remove the metal from Mars’s gravity well to somewhere more useful. Asteroids don’t cut it for all those reasons, at least in the shorter term (and we’re still talking 50-100 years).
Actually, we can’t do any better today; despite the 35 years we’ve had to develop propulsion technology, the CEV proposal still uses impulse injection-type orbits which are limited by firing time and and the specific impulse of chemical fuels. Remember, the faster you go to get there, the more fuel it takes to slow you down; go to fast and you won’t be captured at all. Until we develop a man-rated, high specfic impulse/high thrust propulsion system that is capable of high energy cislunar injection–something like a NERVA rocket–we’re going to be limited to a fairly narrow range of velocities and orbital windows for a reasonable transit time.
You also speak of “unmanned rescue vehicle in orbit, rescue crew”, et cetera; who pays for this? The program you speak of is out of the dreams of Von Braun, with big fleets of ships full of tall, bright-eyed scientists and astronauts boldly leaping across the Lunar surface. The reality–both past and budgeted future–are beer-can thin craft that are as pared down as possible, carrying the minimum (or less) number of people to do the job of planting a flag and scraping up a few samples for the cameras. I’d love to see a space program so well funded that we could legitimately speculate about ideas like yours, but the reality is between the relatively small amount of funds and the egregious waste that occurs during development, plus the expectaton of absolute success or bust, we’re barely able to step beyond Earth’s immediate influence, and once the ticker tape floats down there’s insufficient public or political interest to maintain a progressive program.
Gravity isn’t necessary for smelting and separation operations; centrifugal separation is quite feasible, as is (for ferrous compounds) electromagnetic separation, and the lack of atmosphere is actually a plus for controlling purity. As for lifting against a gravity well, no chemical propulsion method is going to make shipping ore or refined material cost-effective. It’s much more feasible to mine the sky and ship downhill, which is essentially free. There’s also plenty of sunlight in space, and lacking the diffusion that comes with even Mars’ thin atmosphere, can be easily focused and used for a variety of purposes. Profitably exploiting a near Earth asteroid is much more likely than ever getting any material benefit out of Mars. Again, it would be an interesting endeavor given a blank check, but with the limited budget available it merely detracts from either good scientific exploration or successful exploitation of extraplanetary resources.
I can’t disagree with Sam Stone’s sentiments about the need for human exploration, but given the adverseness of both the public and NASA to risk and the lack of development of technologies to mitigate the same, I think it more valuable at this point to dedicate a significant amount of resources to unmanned exploration. Instead, valuable, decades-long and planned out unmanned programs are being slashed wholesale to pay for the disappointment that will be CEV, and a largely pointless Moon shot program (with unlikely promises of an even bigger stunt mission to Sars) that will do little or nothing to advance the state of the art or promote long term space habitation.
Stranger
Sam Stone,
The arts, throughout history, have inspired humanity to reach it’s fullest potential. Do you support that funding of the National Endowment of the Arts?
I would if I thought it actually helped the arts. I’m not convinced.
Frankly, I’d be happy to de-fund NASA, if there were any way the private market could do what it does. At this point, I don’t believe that’s true, although I support any reforms that help move NASA out of the way of private industry.
I see no evidence that the arts need the NEA to fund them. This is doubly true when you look at where NEA funding goes.
A more pointless and reaching non sequitur has rarely been seen by mortal being.
Please have the graciousness to start your own thread rather than hijack this one.
Stranger
I’m sorry. I respect Sam Stone and was genuinely curious about his stance. I think his answer to the question (especially about how the government is uniquely capable of making space travel happen at this point) adds to the discussion.
See this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=262764
And this one: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=351642
[Lewis Black] We haven’t really been to Mars until some guy in a space suit plants an American flag on it and whacks a golf ball. [/Lewis Black]
Robotic missions are all well and good, and can accomplish things that humans will probably never be able to do safely (like muck about on the surface of Venus), but we, as a species need to be out there, for our own survival. Not merely because it reduces the chances of us dying out from an asteroid strike, but because if we’re to evolve, and not remain the same bunch of warmongering, enviroment destroying beasts that we presently our, we’re going to have to physically change ourselves, and since we’re pretty much agreed that deliberately tinkering around with our DNA to a large extent is verboten, and predation no longer drives our evolution, if we’re going to make the big changes that are needed, then we have to do something. Humans in space for long periods of time strikes me as the best way to accomplish this.
A few of points:
[ul]
[li]The viewpoint article you’ve cited doesn’t really mesh with the majority view, nor does it jive with the reality of modern predators, most of whom seem fearful, or at least shy, of the upright stature of man. [/li][li]The notion of developing intelligence as a means of “outsmarting the predator”, while not unseen in other animals, is both unacceptibly reductionist and fails to account for the lack of other highly intellectually developed land mammals. Most animals escape predation not by growing oversized, energy-intensive, and childbirth-complicating brains but by physically outcompeting with either the predator or their fellow speices-members. There are clearly other adaptive pressures that lead to the development of intelligence beyond merely escaping predation.[/li][li]Far from being “pretty much agreed that deliberately tinkering around with our DNA to a large extent is verboten,” I find it highly likely that gene therapy and modification will continue to progress. Despite the protestations of a minority group comprised of self-identified expert bioethicists and religious pundits, the advantages in eliminating weaknesses and chronic defects it too appealing to leave aside, and thus seemlessly follows modifications and enhancements. We may not do the necessary research in the US–at least, not so long as the standing morality is driven by ignorance and superstition–but research is continuing apace in Europe and on the Pacific Rim. [/li][li]There’s no indication that moving into space will make humanity any less of a “bunch of warmongering, enviroment destroying beasts that we presently [are]”; regardless of the vast wealth that awaits us elsewhere in the solar system, we can continue to expect political conflict and violence to be a part of life. As a race, we can take some measure of comfort that the eggs are better dispersed and able to survive a cataclysmic assault, but we will also cringe at the unenforcability of the social contract in the vast wastes between worlds. [/li][/ul]
There are good reasons to explore (and exploit) the solar system, but arguing evolutionary perrogatives isn’t really a good sell. The real reason–the one that will cause the unwashed and anti-intellectual masses to unflaggingly and reliably support space exploration–is that there is profit and resource to be had. In order to make that case, though, you first have to demonstrate the feasibility of doing so, which does not seem to be a menu item on NASA’s plate.
Stranger
Not NASA, perhaps. But there is the Heinlein Foundation, which awards the “Heinlein Prize” for achievements in commercial spaceflight. http://www.heinleinprize.com/ And the X-Prize Foundation. http://www.xprizefoundation.com/ And the Planetary Society. http://www.planetary.org/home/