Your analogy breaks down because Kitty Hawk was performed by two guys with rudimentary engineering skills working out of their garage. It’s laugable to compare that with the resources, energy, and labor involved for something like the Apollo program.
And no-one’s “holding off on going into space”. We’re continuing to launch commercial satellites at a greater rate than ever. NASA has even more money for unmanned launches and actual science programs than they ever did.
Many sci-fi fans have a mistaken belief that launching as many manned chemical rockets as possible somehow advances technology toward alpha centauri and the U.S.S. Enterprise sooner. It doesn’t. It pushes that dream farther away.
Manned spaceflight is useless, mostly. We need to research better ways of getting off this rock. Until we can get launch costs reduced by an order of magnitude, theres nothing we can really accomplish there.
Including research on living in space. Problem is, we would be learning all the wrong lessons. When we can get enough low cost lift capacity, living and working in space becomes easy. Space is a really easy environment. We routinely build self contained machines that operate in much more hazardous environments(submarines, anyone?).
Space is difficult because its so hideously expensive it places a premium on the amount of materials we can use to build vehicles, and we must push the envelope of materials and engineering to get the vehicles as light as possible.
So… Its my opinion that putting money towards anything other than getting a working space elevator or something of the sort is the only viable way to proceed with manned space exploration/exploitation.
They haven’t been funded! But neither has a manned mission. What I said was that for the price of a manned mission we could send thousands of robotic missions.
By the way, the ultimate point of the Bob Park quote I posted above was that the previous administration knew that the Moon-Mars program was way too expensive and would have to be cancelled, but it was a case of Bush saddling the next administration with the responsibility of being the one to pull the plug.
But they’re still decades ahead of human exploration, at a small fraction of the cost.
And this, too, argues against human exploration. A robotic mission or two fails, and it’s disappointing, but not a big deal. Can you imagine, if we were to do a human mission to Mars, what would happen to the program when the inevitable happens and we can’t get the guys back? Like they’re left to starve, freeze, or kill themselves before they do? That will be the end of your exploration program.
They aren’t better than a human by a long shot. They creep along slower than a snail and heaven forbid they hit a rock. They’re astoundingly good at that, but so?
That’s from part II of an article about manned vs. unmanned and it doesn’t strike me as particularly biased and does make the case for unmanned space exploration too.
Here’s a timeline of satellites and space probes where you can count the failures and partial successes yourself. When you look at partial successes, ask yourself if a human onboard would have failed.
Well, age notwithstanding, a human wouldn’t need 5 years to gather that information. They could do it in one day, and in 5 years they could gather thousands of times the information, and do far more with it.
I agree man and machine working together gets the best results. I already said sometimes comparing the two is apples and oranges.
The analogy is fine. You don’t get from the first airplanes to jets by waiting for jets to appear. You have to build everything in between or it ain’t gonna happen.
And we wouldn’t be sending up ANY satellites if we didn’t send up the first ones and then keep doing it. What’s your point?
Well, there you go again with that tired old strawman about someone’s goal being a manned mission to Alpha Centauri and inventing FTL. It’s tired, dude.
Typical of how “Earthies” warp the debate with propaganda and lies to support their “Only one world” agenda? The theory of relativity is just a theory…
This is a preposterously disingenuous response. The “thousands of [robotic] missions” that could have been performed for the cost of manned missions (mostly to the ISS in what are essentially sustainment roles) haven’t been performed because the budget has been allocated to manned spaceflight missions. (Thousands is hyperbole, but at USD 1.5-2.0B per STS launch to Low Earth Orbit with virtually no scientific benefit, this easily gives two or three long term interplanetary missions of the same class as the Mars Exploration Rovers, and this includes the significant cost of mission operations and data interpretation and processing.) For the body of knowledge obtained, these missions are a fraction of a penny on the dollar compared to the most valuable of manned missions to date (the Apollo J-class extended missions and the Skylab 2-4). The scale of effort for these missions, on the other hand, is considerably smaller than even the modest STS missions; a Shuttle launch and mission ops takes a cast of thousands, while the typical JPL mission will have an mission ops contingent of a few dozen people, plus the science team (largely academic researchers and contractors) and the launch vehicle operations team; call it a few hundred people.
I find it hard to see how “we haven’t had real space exploration in decades”; in the last thirty years we’ve gone from a very bare knowledge of what the Jovian and Saturnian systems even look like, and almost no knowledge about the outer worlds, to having sent probes in near orbit of all of the gas giants, explored the larger moon system of Jupiter and Saturn, and are sending a probe to explore the diminutive Pluto-Charon system, in addition to our Mars explorations. Indeed, the only world we haven’t visited is Mercury, and the toxic Venus remains largely an enigma.
Of course, we haven’t had any real manned exploration, largely because it is so very difficult and costly; it is quite evident that >90% of the cost of manned missions is just keeping the crew alive, even if for a few days, and those costs and associated risks go up dramatically for long duration missions for which we have little experience and lack several areas of necessary development (sustainable closed life systems, constant thrust propulsion).
As for an astronaut being more capable than a robot, it is hardly fair to compare a guy in shirt sleeves to a robot; a real astronaut would be constrained in a heavy and very restrictive pressure suit (lke the Apollo A7L) which limits mobility and dexterity to a ridiculous extreme, and results in astronaut fatigue in just a couple of hours of light effort, not to mention that an astronaut has to return to a spacecraft environment every few hours to feed, excrete, and sleep, and if his suit suffers any significant malfunction, he’s dead and no amount of firmware uploads will bring him back to life. In comparison, the Mars Rovers have suffered wear and damage beyond any reasonable design expectation, have been left unmaintained on the surface of Mars for over six years and are still partially or mostly functional, giving them an operating life of more than 35x the original mission design life. Far from being less flexible or capable than a human, the Rovers are vastly more capable than we would expect any single astronaut could be, and for a tiny fraction of the cost to place and sustain a human being in a harsh extraterrestrial environment. See [post=12142238]this post[/post] for an itemized comparison between the capability of the Mars Science Laboratory rover versus an astronaut.
It’s funny, but I think the same thing about the, oh, let’s call them the ‘pragmatist’ side of the debate. By completely discounting the manned side of things, they achieve just the opposite of their supposed goals. What they end up doing in reality is gimping the manned side (which is never going to go away), while not really getting all that funding for their own unmanned side, because, frankly, while unmanned robots are cool, they simply can’t capture the public’s imagination like a manned mission would. They take to long. You just can’t get emotionally involved in the plight of an unmanned rover. They fail after years of waiting and anticipation.
And this make it easier for, when some politician is looking for to score some quick points to cut the budget (which is already laughably small), they can just cut funding to NASA and, to anyone who is an idiot, it will appear they are really doing something.
Look at what Obama is really doing here. Is he cutting funding? Nope. He’s actually increasing it. He’s simply getting rid of the manned mission to the moon. Is that going to free up loads of cashola for unmanned exploration? Not as far as I can see, since NASA has been given no real direction. So, instead, they will spend some of the money on continuing to develop manned stuff, and some of it on unmanned exploration…so, we’ll get the worst of all worlds.
We aren’t going to get ‘thousands’ of unmanned missions…or even hundreds. We’ll get a few. And the public will look at them and go ‘oh, that’s cool’, then forget about it, and when the next politician comes along (possibly Obama when he’s working up the next budget…or the one after that) with an ax and an eye to look like he’s tough on the budget, it will be NASA that get’s the cuts. And, ultimately, it’s guys like you on the ‘pragmatic’ side who are responsible, because by completely discounting any manned exploration (calling it worthless, etc etc), you will ultimately kill the whole thing…or so gimp it, that it might as well be killed, for all the good it will do.
I agree that manned space missions (especially to the Moon) are pointless. They will not advance our knowledge in any significant way.
We are far better off developing robotic probes, which will deliver the information at a lower cost and lower risk.
Save manned missions for when we develop nuclear powered rockets-then we can get to Mars in a few weeks.
It’s funny, but I have this tacked to my office wall and was thinking about it as I was writing that. And if I’m going to be honest, I actually could and have been emotionally involved in the rovers on Mars…but then I’m a space geek (or at least a wanna-be space geek).
The question isn’t manned spaceflight versus unmanned spaceflight - it is government run manned spaceflight. if the government had controlled aviation in 1903, there would be a two year pause for investigation every time a pilot crashed a plane and was killed. We be flying biplanes at best. Aviation took off because lots of individuals and later companies build lots of different planes, and the market and physics decided which designs were successful. And no one tried to cross the Atlantic a few years after the first flight, which is what a Mars flight would be.
We’ve got so many satellites up because industry builds them. Government will be involved in spaceflight, to support national security needs and some research, but the advances are going to come from the private sector.
Actually the answer now is “not yet.” When costs come down a lot more stuff becomes profitable. Going too early just give the whole enterprise a bad reputation. The real problem is that NASA has forgotten how to build cost effective man rated rockets.
And if I’m going to be honest, I actually could and have been emotionally involved in the rovers on Mars…but then I’m a space geek (or at least a wanna-be space geek).