Cite for the US immediately dumping the ISS please. As to the final costs, well the State department turned ISS into a make work project for Russian scientist to prevent proliferation. By complicating the project in that manner, it seems almost inevitable that cost overruns would show up.
Besides, according to here shuttles get retired first, ISS is used until 2013 and then the US gets out. 10 years worth of use, 15 years work of building expertise. Not great, but hardly terrible.
Except that talented scientists tend to be attracted to good science not to good PR. The reason those scientists were attracted to the rover missions is because that’s good science.
I’m sure that there will be some interesting science/technological issues in trying to get men to Mars but for the price we are going to pay it would likely make more sense to fund real science directly. (And the actual science that these manned missions themselves will perform will almost certainly be trivial in comparison to what the robotic missions perform.)
Okay, my bad on the timeline of us getting out of the ISS … All I heard on the news this morning was that we were going to get out of the ISS; I didn’t hear the timescale. [I of course wait with baited breath to see all the exciting science that gets performed by the space station over the next nine years.]
As for the State Department’s involvement, considering that they provided the only useful rationale for the ISS, I hardly think one should blame the whole fiasco on them. (My only critique of their point of view is that it probably would have been much cheaper to just pay the Russian scientists directly.) And, I doubt that is what the cost overruns are mainly attributable to. Look back at the shuttle program and you’ll probably see similar cost overruns.
Talented scientist and engineers are just like you and me and my uncle Bob. They get attracted to where the money is.
I think your dichotomy is false. It’s not a choice between using the money on robot missions or human missions. But between human missions and higher subsidies to hog farmers or something. Anyway I disagree that the science will be trivial. I think human in space is the most important element of the space program. I suppose a Moon / Mars project will solve a great many problems regarding how to help humans survive in space, which BTW robot missions will do very little to solve. Knowledge gained from robot missions is splendid, but I believe ultimately that knowledge should be used for something more directly involving man.
Winston:
In general, I don’t think so, and you’re doing them a disservice by dismissing them that way. Most of the ones I know, and I hope I’m one of them too, are attracted by psychological rewards first. Sure, the money has to be adequate to live on and raise a family with, and a vast amount of money can be attractive enough to a bright young technologist to lure him away, but that is hardly at the top of the list when career-hunting.
The sheer size and significance of a project, the chance to be able to say one day “I did that” and get an awed response, the opportunity to truly change humanity or the world, the chance to learn something important that nobody else has ever known, the simple sexiness of the project, that’s what attracts top technical talent.
Which is not to say that this is it. It isn’t the money, less than 10 milli-Iraqs/year, but the timeline and the commitment to it, requiring real leadership and vision, that are questionable here. We’ve had enough false starts and abandoned-partway projects since the end of Apollo to make an entire generation of aerospace geeks nauseous, and there’s no reason to do it again. From the little that’s been leaked, Bush intends to ignore the ISS (pissing off all those little non-Coalition countries that trusted us, but fuck 'em) and drain other already-shoestringed NASA programs to help fund what I’ve heard called “Moon Base Dubya”. One might hope that he’ll actually do something about it, not make a bold speech like his dad did then simply refuse to do anything at all to make it happen.
Yes, we need to do it, for our species’ sake. No, this guy won’t make it happen, and if he tries, his failure will help keep it from ever being tried again.
Well, this is far from clear. [url=]Here is what the NY Times article says:
So, most of the money would actually come from re-allocating portions of NASA’s budget. Would this all come out of the manned program or will part of it come out of the unmanned program and other programs that are actually doing real science?
By the way, Grey, the NY Times article also says “The president said the United States should commit itself to completing work on the international space station, in conjunction with America’s 15 partners, by 2010.” I don’t know what this means exactly.
Nonsense. The ONLY advantage of a robot probe over a manned expedition is that a robot probe is much cheaper – requiring no life support, nor extra fuel for a return trip. But there is no scientific research a robot can do, that human astronauts on the scene can’t do better; and, at the present stage of robotic technology, there is a lot of research humans can do, that robots can’t do at all. Do you think a robot is going to be able to dig deep into the crust of Mars and look for fossils? Or, if it finds them, bring them back to Earth for study?
At any rate, the Planetary Society has posted an appreciative response to Bush’s plans: http://planetary.org/human/president_statement.html. Curiously, the Mars Society (http://www.marssociety.org/index.asp) has posted no such mention on its website, as yet.
Well, for one thing, “cheaper” (actually much, much cheaper) means you can do more for the same price. After all, we are constantly reminded about the importance of economic tradeoffs on this board, especially by the likes of people like Sam Stone who will no doubt be here any second to argue that this sort of thing should be subjected to rigorous cost-benefit analysis, just as he argues must be done for various environmental regs & international agreements (even ones for which this had in fact already been done).
Besides which, Park’s point is that by the time they can get humans to Mars, the robotic missions could/would have already done the most important things.
Also, it is the non-expendability of humans that makes them both so much more expensive and and also so much more fragile as explorers.
Personally, I don’t see why it would be more difficult to have a robot dig into the crust and search for fossils and even return them back to the Earth than it would be to send humans there to do it. Actually, my wild guess is that it would be easier (although by no means easy) all things considered.
By the way, here is an article that gives a variety of scientific views on Bush’s proposal.
As regards funding tradeoffs:
Now, that is quite a surprise! Who would have thought that group would endorse their own idea?!?
I tend to agree with jshore on this. One of the key arguments for space exploration is spinoff technolgoy. Improving AI and robotics to the point where those technologies get significantly closer to human capabilities would seem to be a very useful indeed. People can always follow later, as technology makes it cheaper and (more importantly) safer.
Dumb idea. The money would be better spent on researching space elevators and better unmanned missions. Throw some of it at the ISS if you have to feed the ‘humans in space’ jones.
The ISS is not sufficient. The only way to learn to survive on the Moon is to go there and learn to survive. The only way to learn how to perform deep space missions is to undertake them. The technology to develop space elevators does not exist. The technology to colonize the Moon and go to Mars does, and needs to be matured.
Here’s a rather cynical response from New Urbanist commentator James Howard Kunstler’s online column, “Clusterfuck Nation,” at http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary9.html:
Of course. And just because I’m a big proponent of space exploration doesn’t mean I’m an instant convert to any big-government boondoggle that promises the moon but can’t deliver.
So far, this program is long on vision, and short on details. That’s where the devil lies. I’ll be mighty pissed if some bloated, unrealistic program comes along that displaces funding for programs that have a large chance of success and a high return on investment. For instance, I’ll be sorely disappointed if the Terrestrial Planet Finder and the James Webb telescope get axed to pay for this.
One thing I hope we can agree on is that *something had to change. The current NASA is a mess. We have a very expensive space station that does no real science, being maintained by a shrinking fleet of space shuttles that are getting long in the tooth and risky. These two programs between them consume about six billion dollars a year, and we get very little in return. The current state of affairs is unsustainable and extremely expensive. Kudos for Bush for shaking the establishment.
What do I think of Bush’s idea? " Oh, God, the democrats are right, he is a moron."
I do wonder, though, if there’s a correlation between thinking the space program is worthwhile and having been alive in 1969, and thinking it’s a foolish waste of money and being born after the moon landing. I bet space missions seem ever so much more impressive to people who were alive during the space race.
I was fourteen years old in 1969 and remember the Moon landing like it was yesterday. I think that it was the most important achievement in human history and I just cannot understand the mindset of people that think that it and the further expansion of humanity off this world is a waste. So, I guess I fit your correlation. BTW, I am as yellow a dog Democrat as you can get, but I would make a deal with the Devil incarnate to make this come true.
My sentiments exactly. Skyward ho!
I am of the same age and completely agree with you.
Yet, I also cannot understand why people would want to give tax breaks and let little Black kids in Mississippi go without a school lunch.
I’ll give mine back. I think it was seven bucks a week.
Cool animation on NASA TV after the speech, though.
I’m just wondering about a quote I saw saying that this supposed new deep-space vessel would be constructed and tested by 2008. That’s four years, folks, to fully design, build, and test a complex vehicle to the point where we can be absolutely certain it’s not going to Challenger on our butts. Does anyone with more knowledge of these things think this timeline totally off-base?
2008? Where did you see this? Just this afternoon on the radio, I heard that Bush’s plan calls for establishing a permanent Moon base by 2020, and a Mars expedition by 2030.