Well, I don’t know guys. While it is cool that I managed to spawn the 6th most populous thread ever (by posts), I think it’s kind of getting down to, “You’re wrong,” “No, you’re wrong.” For me, I haven’t seen any convincing reasons why we should stop spending the miniscule percentage of GDP that we do on manned space flight, except possibly this one:
Sure. If I believed for a second that the money spent on manned space flight would be diverted directly to other space flight research, I’d say do it in a second! But I don’t. And I really can’t believe that any of you do, either.
We all know it’d just go back into the military or some other pork barrel. And, I really think that the space program would be phased smaller and smaller to eventually just keeping up the satellite biz. Unless, of course, some other country managed to get killer satellites into the skies, and then you’d see some money spent on spaceflight. But we all know that isn’t very likely to happen.
So, sure, if anyone can think of a way to keep space research going without the glamour of manned flights, I’d love to hear it. I’d be happy to help you promote it. But right now I just don’t trust the politicians to do the right thing, so we need to fight to keep whatever we’ve already got. Anything we give up, I be happy to lay good money that we will not get back.
(Oops, hit [post] too soon.) I also wanted to say thanks for the nice welcome. It’s been cool chatting with everyone. I’ve never come on before because I’ve always thought that Adams has been pretty much right on with his columns. Like some of the others, I was pretty surprised by his comments. I do see where he is coming from, that the money spent on manned flight could be better used on other research. But, like I said, I think that if the money was taken out of the manned flights, it would not go into other space research. I still haven’t seen anyone, even Adams, give a good reason why they think it would.
So you agree that the current manned space program is pointless except as a PR drive?
I’m sorry, but I find the cynicism of this view horribly depressing. If you want the government to give you the bucks you better be ready to stride forward boldly into the future. If you want the public to be excited about spaceflight, you need to do something genuinely exciting. Timidly clinging to the current program of manned space exploration as a liferaft against funding cuts is neither bold nor exciting and will ultimately doom the agency.
The government supports lots of “nonglamorous” basic research in a whole variety of fields – physics, medicine, environmental studies. I would argue that the current Potemkin village of manned space flight is harming the cause far more than it is helping by creating the impression among the political classes that space exploration is fundamentally pointless.
What’s exciting to the public is real discovery on a real frontier. An autonomous robot crawling around on Pluto, returning the first new pictures from the surface of an alien world – now that would be a better way to secure space funding. Not another make-work shuttle experiment on how seeds germinate in microgravity … .
Well, first of all, Oh Perfect Master- your column did not mention that it was only the MANNED space program you were talking about.
Does anyone here care to dispute that satellite technology- GPS, weather, intelligence, research, TV, etc- hasn’t paid for itself over & over?
And- so- what do you think we’d have for satellites if it wasn’t for the manned space program, and the need for big boostsers to launch humans? We’d still be putting up football sized things in updated V-2’s, that’s what. The manned space program drove the space program as a whole- we wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the 'space race". So- taken as a whole- just the Satellite portion of the Space program has “paid” for the whole damn thing- Shuttles & all.
Then- it could be argued that the “space race” was part of what we used to bankrupt the old Soviet Union, and thus win the “cold war”.
Sure, right now it (the manned program) hasn’t all that much value - aside from the “cool factor”. But it could someday pay for itself a hundred times over. Or not. However- look at what % of the National Budget that Nasa- ALL of NASA accounts for. If there was one of those fancy “pie charts”- you wouldn’t even be able to SEE the line that is NASA’s share. And- only a part of that is for the Manned space program- the rest is for satellites, probes, etc.
And there have been scientific & technological advancements out of the Space Program- in fact, one freind I know who works for NASA claims that if they had been able to patent their “inventions”- those patents would have paid for the entire budget. Maybe not, but still.
So- right now- right here- we can’t see a lot of “put it in our pocket & count it” ROI from continuing the MANNED space program. I’d say Cece’ makes a point. But even he doesn’t have 20/20 foresight. Maybe it’ll return what we put into it a millionfold. Maybe nothing. But it is the budgetary equivilent of pocket change.
And say for that same pocket change- your freind (brilliant, but uneven) came to you and said: “I have a ‘Start Up’. Invest that $1.43 in your pocket. For that you’ll get a cool title, some neato stock certificates, and one chance in a million of becoming a millionaire. Or- maybe you’ll lose the ‘entire’ $1.43.” Let’s see- if you win- you get rich- and some “cool factor”. if you lose- you still have the “cool factor”. Only an idiot wouldn’t take him up on it.
It was pointed out long before the first shuttle flight, loudly and often, that NASA should not be in the operational spaceflight business. Governments have always done that sort of thing poorly. Not from a safety standpoint, but from a cost and innovation standpoint.
Harking back to Phil’s post:
Beal Aerospace of Dallas, TX shut down specifically because the government’s subsidies to existing contractors distorted the market, making it impossible for strictly commercial enterprises to succeed. Aerotech news article
Pretty much everything we’d want to do in space, barring a few exceptions, like communications and resource monitoring, requires Cheap Access To Space (CATS.) We’re never going to see that with the current system of space-as-a-jobs-program.
Much as I’ve enjoyed and been proud of seeing men in space now, I think it might be prudent to step back and accept that a few years will lapse. Get NASA out of the operations business and squarely back into the research business. Then, a few years from now, one or more private enterprises will build on the experience we gained from the NASA manned space flights to build safer and cheaper man-rated systems.
Yes, we’ll “lose” money from the NASA budget. But that’s not where the money should really be allocated from in the first place. The technology has reached the point where it’s now reasonable for commercial ventures to put together a business plan based on putting humans in space and have some expectation of breaking even. Once those are operating then NASA can lease time/flights from them to build toward the Next Big Thing.
Why on, hah, Earth do you guys act like it’s some sort of habit? Twice in twenty years?
Somewhere else in this rapidly expanding thread, someone mentioned the cost of all those tests you have to do on a new type of airplane before it’s approved for use. That, and the heap of redundant systems, is to avoid as much as possible that it, y’know, falls down, blows up, pieces of the engine comes flying through the cockpit and disrupt the beverage service or that monsters gnaw on the wing and frighten the passengers. For space travel, I imagine it is much, much worse.
Now, you want to increase the quality and testing to where things can’t go wrong, ever - and you talk about cost?
Well, if it was a long trip, you would have to have a habitable ship, so if the planet wasn’t habitable, you could stay there. Would be kinda depressing, of course{1}{2}.
The Slow Trip possibility makes the argument about FTL being impossible (I loved the “superluminous” expression, btw, whoever said it) less relevant - if FTL can’t be done, then we must travel at lower speeds. Looks less cool on tv and you can’t just take a day off to watch it, but tough. For a long STL trip, however, be it to Mars or Barnard’s Star, we would need experience in having people in space, primarily on the space station, I suppose, but we have to get there as well.
Also, unmanned space exploration, though it is useful and a great thing and so on…doesn’t…count, sort of. We could just send a probe to a different star and take some pictures and pick up some rocks and soil and send them back, but that’s like throwing a bottle in the water, letting it float to the Mediterranean, pick up some fragments of sculpted marble and an olive, a bit of sand from a beach and a very small philosopher, and saying you’ve been on vacation in Greece. Manking didn’t go, but we were good at making tools that could go there. Throwing a hammer in the air doesn’t mean you can fly.
So, while unmanned space exploration is great, it doesn’t bring the same level of inspiration, imagination, dream - as Cecil put it, cool.
Yeah, airplanes would eventually have evolved anyway, and if Columbus had just waited for that he would have discovered America a lot more easily - though for getting to another star, that - a different way of travelling than sea/space - would be waiting for the Universe to contract before the Big Crunch, 'cause then the other star’d be much closer, wouldn’t it, and we could just walk across. Bummer if it didn’t happen, of course.
{1} Sort of like I imagine it was really like to be the first on the South Pole; after gritting your teeth and making your way through miles and miles of empty frozen wasteland, you finally reach a bit of empty frozen wasteland which, after some calculations, turn out to be right smack in the middle of nothing much, really. A postcard written by Roald Amundsen to his wife from the South Pole (that is, the card was written at the South Pole (unless, of course, I’m making all this up), his wife wasn’t a penguin, although of course after so many nights in a thousand degrees below, thinking that you should have brought an extra sweater, you might get some unconventional ideas) reads (Time and the ice have made parts of the card unreadable, noted by {…}): “We have finally reached the Pole. This is it.(Note: It is unclear if that last piece of punctuation should have been a dot or a question mark.) Gazing, sapped of strength, at the emptiness of my surroundings, in this moment I think back at how you encouraged me so to go on this expedition, and I wish you were here, {…} bastard {…} when I get back {…} such a damn thrashing {…} *believe how empty this place is {…}”
Inspiring words indeed. It is not clear why Amundsen wrote in English, but this might be why he didn’t post it.
{2} Though not as bad as when it’s your turn to go out and scrape off the vicious, spacesuit-eating space barnacles, particularly when you’re travelling at full speed (‘Hey, guys! I lost my grip! Wait up! Guys?’).
Yeah. The US space program has killed a total of 17 people in the past 40 years. It’s not a safe job (one death per 127 staff-years in space, compared to one per 2,000 in US agriculture or one per 4,500 in US coal mining) (warning: statistics compiled from possibly incomparable sources), but it’s not exactly guaranteed lethal.
I’ve enjoyed the Straight Dope for years. Is this the first time Cecil has missed on his answer? Just a FEW quick ways that the space program has improved our lives:
Wristwatches that we don’t have to wind up anymore. NASA needed a better way to synchronize time.
Scuba masks and ski goggles with anti-fog coating. The space capsule windows kept fogging up.
Our refrigerators are lighter these days because the always weight-concious space program developed lighter insulation.
Cheap long distance. I still have to remind my Mom that she doesn’t have to worry about “running up my phone bill.”
On Spacelab-D the Germans flew an experiment to brew beer. Who says that’s not worthy?
Not to mention the very worthy work producing health benefits for the wheelchair-bound.
That’s just scratching the surface. The one thing I fault NASA for is that they don’t do a good job of publicity. Want more info? Check out NASA.gov or techtran.msfc.nasa.gov.
Uh, no, it’s a simple fact. I took the number of hours US astronauts have been in space, converted that to years (assuming a 40-hour work week), so that the figures would be comparable to time spent at work in other jobs, divided by 17 deaths, then dug up the accident rates in agriculture and coal mining.
There haven’t been a whole lot of accidents in the US space program, but there haven’t been a whole lot of people going into space, either.
Sure, an astronaut, or a miner, is still more likely to die off the job than on it. That was my point, really: the space program does kill people, but the risk isn’t as overwhelming as opponents make it out to be. But claiming that it’s a safe job when statistics show it’s more dangerous than coal mining is absurd.
Cheap long distance had nothing to do with the space program. Cheap long distance happened because the long distance industry was de-monopolized. It was competition and innovation in the private sector, not NASA, that drove the cost of long distance telephone service down.
Satellites made it cheaper to provide long distance; deregulation brought the price to the consumer down to what the technology permitted. (I’m not sure how heavily sateliites are used for domestic traffic, though, so the effect on domestic prices may have been minimal.)
But satellites have little to do with the manned space program.
And I think satellites had little to do with cheap phone calls. Phone calls started getting cheap when carriers converted to fiber optic links, SONET, and SS7. The driving technology behind those is the semiconductor processing power to handle high data rates. Now there are those who claim that the Apollo program was responsible for integrated circuits, but I think that’s BS - it was the large market for those products. As an experiment, try counting the number of ICs that you personally own. And estimate how many everyone else owns. Then add in how many are owned by industry.
Funny that this article came so close to the Tunguska event article. The crappy movie Armageddon aside, the next time a “dinosaur killer” asteroid hurtles towards Earth, we may be glad to have every bit of space technology handy. We’d only have to divert a pretty small rock aimed at an industrialized country in order to justify every penny ever put into space flight.
Man, hard to carry a cohesive conversation in a busy thread…
By “on the horizon”, I understand that to mean that people are currently doing work which has a reasonable chance of leading to a particular technology. There’s nobody in the U. S. still doing research on controlled fusion power at all (at least, not directly), much less on using it for propulsion, so I think it’s safe to say that fusion propulsion is not on the horizon. That does not, of course, mean that we won’t eventually develop fusion propulsion: It’s just a matter of those engineering hurdles which I mentioned earlier.
Funnier, still, that just this last weekend – totally by coincidence, and without Cecil’s columns even crossing my mind – I read Arthur C. Clarke’s The Hammer of God. (I kept having to remind myself that he was writing it 5 years before the movie Deep Impact came out, so as not to think he was ripping it off.)
