Can we disband the Department of Education while we are at it? Folks who have kids or just think its worthwhile can pitch in their money and see what return they get. Or Education could be a private concern instead. In fact…hell, I can think of at least a half dozen other departments in the government that can also be disbanded and set up as charities or private concerns. Sounds like a good plan to me…where do I sign up?
-XT
Fahrenheit 711?
I’m in favor of it because I’m in favor of anything that might bring us closer to establishing a permanent and self-perpetuating human presence off the surface of this planet. See this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=262764 But we have to remember that no country on Earth has a “frontier,” any more, in the sense you are using the term, and expansion through military conquest is (we may hope) no longer an option; all valuable territory on Earth is claimed and settled. Yet that does not mean all countries have turned inward. Only a few oddities like North Korea have done that. Most countries are thorougly engaged with the wider world, through commerce and communication and politics.
By general historical consensus, the Old West stopped being a “frontier” with the defeat of the Sioux at the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre), putting a final end to the Indian nations as independent military powers. In space, there are (AFAWK) no enemies for us to fight for possession.
Since education has given better dollar for donuts, you can slide down that slippery slope yourself.
There is ample justification for human spaceflight outside of the science, but, continuing to play ball on your field, every science began in the form of subjective human impressions. Undoubtedly there is much to be gained through robotic exploration, and I hope it continues and expands. But there’s a difference between a gas chromatograph and a chemist.
The fact is, we cannot imagine what it’s like to live on the Moon or Mars. For the most part, we do not even know what the questions are, let alone how to design a robot to answer them.
I fear that our generation has forgotten the difference between the mediated version of an experience and the experience itself. People play video games and watch TV and subconsciously think the characters and situations are real. But they’re just fabrications of someone’s limited and biased imagination. The real world is wide open and not subject to someone’s theory of how it should be. Once you forget that, you’re about half dead.
I guess you’d be pretty disappointed with a fair proportion of science as its carried out these days, because it’s rare that many of us actually see or feel any of the things we investigate directly anymore. For most of my job, and I’m just a lowly biologist, it’s simply not possible, any more than it’s possible for me to look in the sky and see the sun in the X-ray band. If I could carry out my experiments remotely at home and have the results sent to me remotely, it would make no practical difference; and that’s not happening now because I’m a lot cheaper than a robot with similar physical capabilities. The opposite would be true of me even on the Moon. Science has been doing fine without direct sensory input for many years, and naïve posititivism has no place.
But will education alone provide natural resources when mines are depleted? Will it expand our understanding of the fundamental nature of the world? Will it prevent the planet being devistated by a wandering asteroid?
There’s no sense in robbing Peter to pay Paul. I doubt that many people would consider satellites to be a daily benefit to their lives, but many would find their lifestyle to be impacted by the hinderence in meteorological information, intercontinental communication, et cetera were these satellites to cease to exist.
The notion that the knowledge and capabilities we enjoy now is sufficient for the future is a myopic one. The American space program–NASA–is deeply flawed, but that doesn’t mean that the concept of space exploration is without merit. By your argument, extended to its logical, if extreme, conclusion, we should just spend our money directly on “donuts”, and eschew anything that does not contribute immediately and directly to the health and welfare of the citizenry.
Stranger
Bah, naîve…
Has it? Interesting. And here I thought it was a huge waste of money and resources, dwarfing the space program…which has given us such useless things as satelites and the landings on the moon which were THE achievement of the century. Hell, maybe the greatest single achievement of all time, certainly ranked in the top few. I think if we look at what we’ve spent vs what we’ve gotten the Space program would come out on top…we’ve spent a little and got a little (relative to our total budget). With Education we’ve spent a lot and got…a little. YMMV of course.
-XT
Nobody would go to the trouble of building a microscope to look at cells unless he, or someone else, had seen an actual animal and judged it worthy of study. Particle accelerators, in all their abstract glory, stem from the ancients looking at stones and wondering what would happen if they kept on cutting.
I simply contend that for the most part, we do not even know what we should be looking for on Mars. So the robots we’ve built, while very impressive, are overwhelmingly likely to be missing the interesting phenomena.
Landing on the moon is just a shiny bauble. Landing on the moon part two is even less worth it.
Since I’ve pointed out education to be a slippery slope and a distraction from the debate at hand, I fail to see its relevancy. The ability to defend the superfluous funding of an antiquated, inefficient, and bloated space program at the cost of the taxpayers is quite evident when it has to have slippery slopes used in juxtaposition.
Can’t offer naything that might change any minds on the* concept * not being worth (FTR I think it is). But maybe if we put the numbers in some perspective:
The $100bil number is about $358 for each of the 280mil Americans [spread over 13-15 years]. Worth it.
The $100bil number is almost a rounding error, virtually insignificant, in the multi-trillion Federal budgets stretching between now and 2020. Worth it.
The $100bil number is insignificant in the 10’s of Trillion dollar economy between now and 2018ish. Worth it.
Sorry, that’s not proof it’s worth it. That’s proof that it doesn’t cost much in a relative sense. You’d still have to demonstrate that those costs are outweighed by the benefits.
I simply don’t understand how you can argue something must be there if you don’t know what it is. I also don’t understand why human explorers who must rely on sophisticated instrumentation to properly engage in the study of an alien environment for life must somehow be superior to robots that carry the same sort of hardware, can last for months or years, and cost literally a hundreth less to deliver than a human counterpart. Yeah, once we only had our senses, and that inspired us to augment them, but as we’ve left the Tycho Brahe eyeball method of astronomy behind centuries ago, I’m not sure why that’s at all relevant to the current state of the art in observation and experimentation.
OK, let’s look at this: we taxpayers pay taxes, and we get a good part of that back in jobs. The rest winds up in the pockets of the stockholders and execs at contractors, or being spent on materials and equipment.
So as far as jobs are concerned, it’s a net loss. We pay $100B for $60B worth of jobs, if we’re lucky.
I think you’re responding to someone else’s post, not mine. I’m not saying anything of the sort.
While Unc’s already said most of what I’d have said, let me add that the analogy is this: it’s like spending my life in a large, rich, beautiful, and complex valley, one that I’d never be fully able to explore in several lifetimes. And on top of that, I know there’s another, much smaller, much more boring valley on the other side of the planet that others of my nation have already visited, and that we’ve fully explored, photographed, sampled, done spectrographic analyses, etc., and I have access to all that. Not to mention, it seems to be one of those ‘better to travel hopefully than to arrive’ things; if this valley were the next valley over, nobody would visit it, rather than spending more time in our own beautiful valley. The entrancement all seems to be in the challenges and difficulty of the journey.
I also know that my nation has the resources to send no more than a handful of our number to the valley on the far side of the world; I will not be one of those few. And for some reason, I don’t feel like I should help pay for someone else to make this singularly un-worthwhile trip.
That’s my analogy.
If we would stop calling this a ‘moon/mars’ program, it might start making more sense to you guys.
The new exploration vision is really about building a new architecture for a modern space vehicle and assorted capabilities. The CEV isn’t just designed to go to the Moon or Mars. It’s a multi-purpose space architecture that can be configured to go to LEO, the Moon, to Mars, to a near-Earth asteroid, to the Lagrange points, or pretty much any other reasonable target in space.
We absolutely need this. The next generation of space telescopes will be large interferometry arrays located at a Lagrange point. Without CEV, they cannot be serviced.
The beautiful thing about the new architecture is that it IS modular. A small CEV on a solid rocket derived from a shuttle SRB can get crews into space with maximum reliability and minimum cost, with minimal turnaround time. That could be important in an emergency. Need to set up a long-term presence in lunar orbit? Send up a transhab habitation module on a heavy lifter along with six months’ supplies, put the lunar insertion stage in your CEV stack, and off you go.
Do you need to put huge payloads in space for some reason? You can do it cheaply by using the unmanned heavy lifter based on the shuttle SRBs and fuel tank. Cheaper by far to launch than a shuttle, you could sent up half a dozen unmanned payloads, then send your crew up in a small CEV rocket.
It’s a good architecture. It gives the U.S. (and the world) a whole new range of space capabilities, and you only use (and pay for) the hardware you need for any specific task.
And yes, we’re going to use it go to the Moon and eventually, Mars. But the $104 billion isn’t being spent ‘to go to the Moon and Mars’. It’s being spent to build a new space system. It will be used for much more than that.
And it’s a bargain. 16 billion a year is a lot of money, it’s less than half of the increase that the Department of Education has gotten under George Bush. And the Dept of Ed spends almost five times as much. And NASA has probably done as much for education as the Dept. of Ed, by inspiring young people to learn science and math.
It would be good for our kids and for our society to have a new, robust presence in space. Astronauts on talk shows, live web cams on the Moon, tourists in orbit. Manned spaceflight is inspirational in a way that robotic science isn’t. And they are complementary. Having a robust space architecture will open new avenues for research. It will give us options when designing the next generation of telescopes and other scientific hardware.
It’s a good idea.
Offered with minimal comment, this guy has a detailed explanation on why the new “Apollo 2.0” program is poorly thought out. He makes the excellent point that the initial development costs – just like the shuttle – are just a downpayment on what will be many billions in operational costs every year on the new systems.
Having just read the article, I agree with some of it and disagree with some of it. It’s true that a prime motivator of this plan is to maintain existing facilities and manpower and skills. Thus the shuttle-based heavy lifter. Part of dealing with government is accepting that some decisions will be made on a political basis and, since the alternative is to do nothing at all you just have to accept it. That’s where I have a problem with the radical-change advocates. They may be right, but it will never happen. As a corollary to the military saying, “You have to go to war with the army you’ve got”…You have to to go to space with the NASA you’ve got. I’m a big supporter of private space initiatives, but until a private space infrastructure builds up, NASA is the only game in town.
One of the reasons I supported the exploration initiative is because it gets NASA out of the space truck business. That should be left to private industry. By having NASA focus on research and exploration, you get them out of the commercial sphere, which will hopefully allow two space infrastructures to be developed in parallel.