Everyone is tired of reading my opinion that if an Astronaut with a jack were on Mars, the rover would not be stuck and unable to move. 
But it’s the poiont I am making.
Science? Yes, please, lots of it, but if you’re going to use everyone’s money then you can’t say “it might help somehow someday so give me the money and shut up”
No, we don’t.
IF someone had 100 billion bucks to spend and the options were
a) Manned spaceflight
b) Water, sewage, vaccines, mosquito nets, and micronutrients for half a billion people.
I’ll always go “b” no matter how great the discoveries might be. People die now of insanely cheaply preventable stuff and you’d sabe them now.
Of course, we need to spend money on science, but if we’re gonna spend taxpayer money on it, go for basic science not people-on-Mars science. Basic science is the ugly chick of the dance. It has zero glory, zero headlines but it’s so motherfucking important.
Let companies spend their money on megabuck projects.
I’ll repeat. Simply saying “it may bring amazing discoveries” is not justification enough per se.
And, if an astronaut were on Mars, the rover would matter why?
Oh, wait, I guess that was sort of your point.
What does “basic science” mean?
Unlike people, robots are expendable. Even if Spirit had not already completed its mission, spending a hundred billion dollars so you can get it unstuck when just one billion dollars would let you replace it three times over is stupid.
Why is it that this argument only ever seems to get made against space flight? That is such a rigged dichotomy it’s ridiculous. For example, let’s change a) to ‘pets’. In 2007, Americans spent $41 billion dollars on their pets. In 2007, NASA’s budget was just under $16 billion.
Do you know how many children you committed to death by spending money on your parakeet instead of buying mosquito nets for 3rd world children?
Or, how about a) Obama’s middle class college handout, or b) The starving children of the world?
Or surely we could give up a silly game for the starving children? The golf economy is estimated to be about $70 billion dollars. Imagine if Callaway turned their clubs into crutches for crippled orphan children of the soldiers killed protecting our freedom in the third world!
But no, let’s abandon man’s most aspirational achievement and long-term hope for survival. That really should be the first thing on the chopping block. There couldn’t possibly be anything less important in the federal budget or in our lives in general.
The value of spaceflight is inversely proportional to the cost of space launch. You’re looking at the space application market today and declaring it to be too small to support the industry once the ISS shuts down. But what does the market look like if Musk achieves the $800 per pound price he’s saying he can deliver? That may open up entire new markets in space access, which could in turn drive prices even lower. That’s what happens in competitive markets. SpaceX is in a constant race with United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin, and ArianneSpace and a few others, and that drives up the pace of innovation, improves quality, and lowers price.
What we don’t know yet is what the demand curve really looks like, so ultimately the size of the market is unpredictable. They’re all taking real risk in that regard, but I suspect we’ll have a pretty big market at those prices.
Consider space tourism. At $800/lb, a 176lb person can be sent into orbit with luggage for about $150,000. This is well within the range of the ‘ultra-luxury tourist market’ - the people who have 400 ft yachts and private islands and personal Gulfstream jets. To them, a $500,000 week in space is a no-brainer. Hell, there’s probably a couple of Sheikhs over in Bahrain who could build their own space hotel at such low launch prices.
You’re using the plot of a Hollywood movie as an example of the folly of manned spaceflight? Who cares how stupid it is?
Anyway, we may have robots capable of doing a specific job, or we may not. There’s no rule that says robotics technology has to advance as fast as space technology does. There are still plenty of things that we have not figured out how to make robots do, and even some where we don’t even know how to go about tackling the problem.
I agree. Interstellar flight is a much higher hurdle to jump than most people image, I suspect. And I take the speed of light literally. I don’t believe there will ever be a usable ‘warp drive’. That makes interstellar flight something so far off into our future that nothing that still resembles our society will be around when it happens. Might as well be another civilization by then.
But there’s plenty to do and to profit from in our solar system. For example, I believe it may be feasible to build lunar communities inside lava tubes on the moon. Some of those tubes may be miles long and hundreds of feet in diameter.
This is the entrance to a lava tube. Apparently, that hole is big enough that the White House would fit inside it. If there is significant tunnel under that hole, it could be sealed off and turned into a massive habitat. That far under the moon, the temperature is a constant -30F or so. Heat exchangers in the surface sun could pump heat down into the tunnel, or a nuclear power plant could provide power and heat and light for crops.
If we found a tube that extended for many miles, we could house thousands of people in semi-self sustaining fashion. They might be able to grow a large portion of their own food, recycle the water, and just get occasional resupplies of shortage goods, repair/replacement of equipment and the like. And I think we’ll have the technology to do that if we choose to within our lifetimes.
What would such a colony do? Beats me. I hope we find profitable things to do there, but we won’t know until we open up access to it and let the ingenuity of people loose. Maybe we’ll find something valuable enough to make the effort, or maybe we won’t. We shouldn’t let that stop us from trying to find out.
Hell, maybe there’s a market for 5,000 aging billionaires to retire their aching gilded selves to a 1/6 gravity luxury retirement home. But that’s what the ultra-rich are good for: They’re humanity’s early adopters of the really good stuff.
Yeah, I have a bit of a hard time trying to figure him out on that. He sounds sincere, and he’s a really smart guy. On the other hand, it would also be very smart to say teh same things as an aspirational or motivational vision for his workers and for the company’s perception by the public. In other words, it could be marketing. But I don’t know… He’s taking real actions like refusing to take the company public until it’s basically committed to his Mars vision by having the Mars Colonial Transport well into development. Just the fact that he would call it that sounds borderline Bond-Villianesque crazy. But I love it anyway.
NASA can point to plenty of accomplishments. The Apollo program which ended in the mid 1970s. Skylab. A little under a dozen robots on Mars. Every planet in the solar system has been visited. The Hubble space telescope. The Hubble space telescope. The Hubble space telescope. A bunch of orbiting instruments that I can’t name.
I’m all for space colonization, but I’m also in no particular rush. Extended missions in the International Space Station have shown just how hostile space is – and that’s an object that’s protected by the Earth’s magnetic field. Assuming our ambitions extend beyond flag planting missions, we’re going to need lots of space robots anyway.
As for Musk while I respect the guy my enthusiasm is limited. NASA’s accomplishments frankly dwarf his and they’ve taken plenty of risks and dusted themselves off after plenty of setbacks. I think of space exploration as like the internet: success will involve both big guv and big capital. Take away one or the other and it doesn’t happen.
Because you aren’t paying attention? The most famous use of this argument was aimed not at space flight but at military spending, in Eisenhower’s Chance for Peace speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
And unlike your counter-examples, that one actually makes sense. The money somebody spends on their pet or on golf is theirs, to do with as they wish. The money spent by the government on manned space flight, the military, the CIA and NSA, building football stadiums and all that stuff is ours. It is taken from us by the threat of force, a state of affairs that can only be justified if it is used in service of the common good.
If Musk wants to waste his own money on a Mars colony, good for him. I’m not going to stand in his way. It is when people decide they should waste my money on such a boondoggle that I get annoyed.
Quoted for truth, quoted for truth, quoted for truth.
I don’t think much public spending goes towards private pets or golf clubs. Manned space travel comes from sharply limited discretionary funds, and it is completely legitimate for taxpayers to have an opinion on how that is spent.
To give an example, international development has a budget of maybe 20 billion. This covers disaster response that reliably saves lives around the world. It covers food aid which is proven to avert famines-- South Sudan, for example, just narrowly averted a famine thanks to intervention. It covers health programs addressing everything from Ebola to maternal mortality. It covers defense-related development activities. It covers agriculture, democracy, economic growth, education, power, and a huge host of other activiites.
We are talking about a massive, massive amount of good. Right here, right now, which is permanently transforming lives for the better. And more money would do more good.
And then there is, for around the same money, the option of literally throwing our money into the void.
Scientific research is massive, and important. Science theater is not. You may believe that space is mankind’s “most aspiration achievement”, but that is not a universal opinion. Lots of people, including myself, see it as best an interesting aside, and consider other things to be greater aspirations. Your personal fascination is not actually shared by all of humanity, no matter how cool you think it is.
I’m hoping it’s a leviathanically large woosh.
In case it ain’t:
Basic Sciece
Basic Research
The value of basic scientific research
You miss the main point, made by others of private vs. public money.
If only there wer a science that helped up how to dsitribute scarce resources among alternative uses…
1005 agreed
Except that it misses the point.
10000000% agreed.
I kind of hate for making my point better tan I did.
Nice thoughts, however the science doesn’t know the difference. Exploration of space, especially manned (and hopefully womanned as well) may be the path needed to solve some of the ‘cat b’ problems which may go unsolved here on earth. It just may be the right pressure to create things, and give us a different perspective on how humanity works.
I don’t think that it’s impossible to achieve more economies of scale in terms of putting things into low earth orbit. As it gets cheaper there will be companies that choose satellite solutions over alternatives, so yes there is some room for market growth. But space tourism as you say, is a luxury market. One that may make some money, but it will take hundreds of billions of dollars to build a Mars Colony, SpaceX’s raison d’etre, and I don’t see a scenario in which the wealthy space tourists of the world spend enough on space tourism to fund that kind of venture.
It’d be nice if you or other advocates of manned spaceflight would explain what benefit there is to expanding manned spaceflight any further than it is today. Right now there is some value in sending humans to low earth orbit, justify sending them further.
You and XT come off as deeply ignorant about robotics and automation. Are you guys aware of the stuff we’ve automated right here on Earth? Cars and planes that can drive/fly themselves. At major mines they have started experimentally using automatic mining trucks on the mining roads instead of people. Are you familiar with what a continuous miner does? One of those machines isn’t that far away from being automated, which would make mining itself a near zero-labor job. Even now if the will was there it could be easily made into a remote controlled job. Right now the remote control is wielded by an experienced miner operator using a remote connected to a cord connected to the machine, who goes deep into the earth with the continuous miner, but that’s a system that could be pretty easily improved upon and just hasn’t been yet.
I know a guy who is one of the higher ups in IT for Norfolk Southern, in his words “we could actually run our trains with no one on them, if not for the laws mandating the presence of crews and the general negative perception people would have of unmanned trains.”
Much of the remote control and automated technology required to do what I’m talking about is not just on the drawing boards anymore but out in the field, some of it at commercial scale. The idea that it’s easier to put a bunch of human miners on the moon to start mining something or on an asteroid or whatever is ludicrous and shows a deep lack of knowledge of what those sort of ventures require.
XT questioned if it’d be cheaper, also showing lack of knowledge here. How could it not be cheaper? Humans have to be sent up with everything to support life: water, oxygen, food, various other necessities. Robots are sent up essentially just on their own. Posit a large asteroid or moon mining operation. If you send automated machines up there is nothing in that trip that wouldn’t go up with a human mining operation. We wouldn’t send space miners into it with pickaxes, they’d be operating essentially the same machines we could automate. So removing the humans removes payload and mission complexity without adding any real payload to support the automated machines or remote-controlled machines.
What would be the benefit to doing that? I agree it’s cool but I don’t see any profit in it–and profit must be there for a private space venture to work.
I think Musk is a cool guy, but he has real resource limitations. I think he going to be go down in history as a big innovator of cheap, reliable launches into space, but I think a private Mars Colony initiative is frankly a bridge too far. There are big limits to private markets and initiatives (and I’m very much a classical liberal when it comes to economics, on most issues.) There’s a reason all the British colonies ended up as Royal Colonies, some much earlier than others. That was just crossing the Atlantic, it’s much harder to cross the distance to Mars at colony scale.
One thing that will/should come from cheaper and cheaper launch capacity is a move toward launching things into space for space construction. While I remain skeptical of its value, I think long term any ship designed to travel at significant distance should, with reduced launch costs and stronger space construction technologies, be constructed in space–it opens up far more opportunities for properly building a ship designed for long distance travel in the vacuum of space than building things whole that must survive the violent nature of being pushed through our atmosphere with enough force to achieve stable orbit around Earth.
Why try a method that “may” give us a solution in an undetermined time at horrific cost when we already have the solutions today for the problems I mentioned (except, of course, for political instability)?
How can manned missions help improve mosquito nets now? Especially since most of the advances in that area have already been done and what we need is goodwill and political power to make them happen
How can manned missions help improve micronutrient supplements? Especially since we alraedy know 99.999% of all there is to know about how micronutrients help kids and what we need is for them to take them.
How can manned missions help improve clean water access now? Especially since it’s so incredibly low tech.
How can manned missions help improve sewage now? Especially since it’s so low tech.
How can manned missions help improve vaccine deliveries and compliance? We already have the rigth vaccines, the right methods. The only tech difficulty is cold chain, and that’s also low tech.
I’m not saying there can’t won’t be advances that help humanity and that are brought on by manned flights, but “may”, “sometime”, and “whatever the cost” doesn’t cut it for me.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
XT questioned if it’d be cheaper, also showing lack of knowledge here.
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No, I said it would be far less capable, and until and unless we get magical robots this will remain true. You pays less, you get less capabilities. That’s the reality, today, yesterday and probably tomorrow too of robotics in space and it shows YOUR lack of knowledge that you don’t get that (I’ll leave aside your backhanded misquoting of what I was getting at).
Except you are handwaving away the fact that this technology doesn’t exist today to do these sorts of complex tasks either via remote controlled or fully automated machines. You know what CAN do them? Your basic package mark one Homo Sapiens, with standard software and firmware can. Again, all those wonderful missions to Mars we’ve sent rovers to explore (and they ARE wonderful) have managed to explore a few square miles in over a decade…something that one manned mission to Mars would have completed in about a week (leaving them nearly 2 years for more exploration based on the safest path mission profile). Even the fast track profile they would have nearly 2 more months to explore. Would it cost more? Yeah, it would for even the aggregate of all the robotic missions together. But we’d get a whole hell of a lot more out of that one manned mission than we will of decades or centuries of robotic missions at the current technology and pace.
All I’m saying here is there is a place for both manned and unmanned exploration and exploitation missions in space, contrary to what you and others are trying to assert in this and other threads.
It’s because these are not isolated as you make it seem. As we learn more about ourselves, society, biology and our environment we will be better equipped to handle more and more of these problems and also have better implementation, better acceptance and better methods of these, as you call it, simple solutions.
Solving these few issues not only include the scientific know how but the willingness of the people to implement the solution. This makes it currently far from a ‘simply solution’ as you seem to take it.
The simple fact that we have not solved the issues you claim are simple to solve testify that it is indeed not simple. Again this could be because of society, not science, but society is a issue and one that can stop such implementation and evidently has (proving again it is not simple to solve the problems you state are simple to solve).
The “science” part of the solution is done.
The “political will” part, which I mentioned in my post a couple of times, isn’t. No ammount of discoveries, not even Star Trek replicators, can solve that issue.
I repeat my question, How can manned spacefligth help in these specific cases?
You could say the same about basically anything, though. How do super-conductors help in any of those specific cases? Who knows? Maybe they will. How does green energy help in those specific cases? No idea. How does advanced AI factor in? Well, not sure.
Thing is, since you can’t predict the future OR predict future developments, you just don’t know what will or won’t make a difference. Really, we shouldn’t base what we do or don’t do in space on whether it makes us a better mosquito net, in the end. If we need a better mosquito net, well, there is the market for that.
Really? Really? We’ve been using green energy to to help improve clean water access for over a thousand years, and you still can’t figure out how it could help in that specific case?