Yes, because there’s actually something worth doing at the other end (unless you’re flying to Ohio). Until the day a Mars rover stumbles over a cache of Martian archaotech, there’s no reason to want to go until we’ve got the technology to do it for a hell of a lot cheaper.
Protecting the environment keeps us from doing lots of things, yes. It’s becoming increasingly important, too. It’s not in humanity’s best interests to keep drilling and strip-mining everywhere more and deeper. Doesn’t everyone understand that, at this point?
When or if things get genuinely desperate, we’ll destroy Antarctica, but not 'til then. We can easily learn to exploit space resources before turning on our last nature preserves, and that should be a global priority.
[QUOTE=Xema]
Note that Antibob didn’t say the missions accomplished little - he said they accomplished little that couldn’t have been achieved by unmanned missions.
[/QUOTE]
So, you are saying that in the time frame of Apollo there were unmanned missions that could have brought back hundreds of pounds of moon rocks, emplaced laser reflectors, and done everything else the Apollo missions accomplished? That’s news to me. What do you base this on? That we COULD have done all of this if we’d have poured the resources from Apollo into unmanned missions? If so, then the trouble with that is, basically, we wouldn’t have.
Also, AFAIK the best unmanned robotic missions to the Moon in that era were by the Russians, and they came no were near accomplishing what the manned Apollo missions accomplished. Again, if you have evidence otherwise I’m all ears.
As to the Mars unmanned missions, we have nothing to compare them to, manned mission wise. I’d say it’s pretty clear that if we DID have a manned mission to Mars it would overshadow everything we’ve accomplished over the past 2 or 3 decades unmanned wise in one mission, simply because of the time humans would be there, but since we haven’t gone there is no way to to know at this point.
[QUOTE=Great Antibob]
I personally think the footprints and flag are incredibly cool. But I stand by my assertion that the scientific benefit of manned missions is being overblown.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t think so. What I think is that manned missions are being vastly underrated on this board wrt scientific benefit, and unmanned missions are being overstated. That said, I DO think there is a place for unmanned missions, and if we did go to Mars my guess is they would go with tons of unmanned probes to augment the manned mission. The nice thing would be the near real time applications of those probes by humans that are right there, instead of the huge lag times from Earth to Mars that hampers current robotic missions. Also, since there would be real humans there, I think they will see things by simply being able to turn their head on their own instead of having to wait for instructions that that robotic probes could be missing now…or by trying or testing things that the folks who designed the robotic missions years before they got to Mars didn’t think of or couldn’t afford to include when they sent the probe off.
I think you are wrong about everything but the cost. You could, eventually accomplish as much with robotic missions to Mars as you can with a single successful manned mission, no doubt. If you are willing to wait for decades to get the answers and then piece them together. We’ve been sending probes to Mars for over 3 decades now, and we’ve certainly learned quite a bit. But we have yet to definitively prove if there was or even is life there. Yeah, we might find that out in another 3 decades or so of probes, all of which would probably end up costing as much or perhaps less than one manned mission. I suppose it comes down to whether waiting for a few more decades to slowing accumulate the data is cool, or whether it wouldn’t just be better to go and find out now. After all, there is more to explore in our solar system, so if we have to wait decades for this stuff it’s going to be a long time in coming.
They could have…but they wouldn’t have been. Samples COULD have been brought back…but not hundreds of pounds of them, as was done with the manned missions. Everything the Apollo astronauts did COULD have been done by probes…but we’d still be waiting for them to catch up right now (which would have been less for Mars and everything else).
Yeah, Russia sent unmanned probes to the Moon, and they spent quite a bit doing it…but they didn’t come near to the accomplishments with their probes that we did with a couple of manned missions. AFAIK, they got all the moon rocks they used for study from us, right? And all of their soil samples too.
Again, I’m not dissing unmanned missions. They have discovered tons of stuff, and as augments to manned missions they are invaluable. But as the sole means of exploration? They still aren’t ready for prime time, not if you actually want to discover stuff in a timely manner. They also aren’t going to get the same budgets as manned missions, no matter what you do, so you aren’t ever going to be able to spend Apollo scale price tags on unmanned missions.
-XT
I will concede the point that if your goal is to get humans into space, manned spaceflight achieves that goal better than sending robots does.
How much science could be performed by a scientist with his boots on Mars than a probe in the same time frame? The obvious answer is the scientist could perform and do way more tasks. The open question then is do we do one manned Mars mission and reap a huge amount of data, or spread the effort over decades and learn a little bit at a time? I would love to see a manned mission and I think the technological advances made during the attempt would be enormously beneficial. That said, that is a lot of risk to put into a single program rather than mitigating the risk over several robotic missions.
I made up the numbers. The latest Mars rover currently en route to Mars came in at $2.5 billion.
I’m not really the biggest fan of a manned Mars mission right now. Certainly not a quick touch & go flag-planting mission. When we go it should be a serious long-term science mission and semi-permanent space settlement attempt.
Meanwhile, we’ve got plenty to do closer to home. We need energy. Space is where it’s all at. We need space-based solar power. Along with that, we need space habitats filled with more or less regular workers trained to maintain the solar power satellites, and whatever else we put up there. We need cheap, reliable transportation to and from orbit.
Someone asked me if I thought the ISS counted as living in space. I’d say no, not really. It was cute at first, but fairly useless now. The ISS should be growing its own food in large, rotating greenhouses. They should be growing their own hamburger in vats. They should be learning how to fabricate basic structural materials from raw material. All sorts of stuff. The ISS doesn’t cut it, as is.
As for selling a manned Mars mission, I dunno. I guess when our planet-killing asteroid finally shows up, at least some robots will survive. 
I don’t believe it is fair to compare robot technology from the 60’s & 70’s to what is available today. And when we talk about a manned Mars mission, we really need to talk about the robot technology that will be available today and a minimum 10-20 years out when people could possibly make it there if earnest work started today.
I won’t argue that Spirit and Opportunity are superior to a person. But Curiosity will hopefully land this August and it is getting close to being superior when you consider:
- The Cost, simple dollars
- Curiosity can work 24/7 collecting data. Humans will be essentially spend most of their time surviving. They will need to be preparing for their trip back (especially if they need to manufacture fuel and/or food while they are on Mars). Only a small percentage of their time could be spent doing actual science work.
- Mobility - humans will need to have some sort of a base, where they will need to return to each day. Long surface treks around the planet are out of the question
- Longevity - it is designed to explore for at least 687 Earth days, but if Spirit and Opportunity are any indicators the mission life could long exceed this. Humans would likely last 3 months to a year at most.
- The Cost - for a still small fraction of the cost we could sent a Curiosity like probe (improving each year) to several different points of the planet - maximizing the science gain from various geographies. As mentioned above, humans would be far less mobile.
[QUOTE=This_Just_In…]
I don’t believe it is fair to compare robot technology from the 60’s & 70’s to what is available today. And when we talk about a manned Mars mission, we really need to talk about the robot technology that will be available today and a minimum 10-20 years out when people could possibly make it there if earnest work started today.
[/QUOTE]
Sure it is, if we are doing an apples to apples comparison. Apollo happened during that time frame, so saying we could have done better with unmanned missions has to compare unmanned technology that existed during Apollo to the manned Apollo missions. We couldn’t have done similar missions with the unmanned tech that existed when we did do Apollo.
I doubt we could do most of that today, at least as far as the heavy lifting stuff of getting hundreds of pounds of rock samples back from the Moon and doing all the other stuff that they did.
None of the probes work 24/7 collecting data. That’s total horseshit. They don’t have the power budgets to work 24/7/365 (well, 668 and a touch I suppose), and they aren’t fully autonomous, so they need periodic command instruction type uploads as well as on the fly mission planning.
It’s also horsehit that humans would last 3 months at most. The long mission would REQUIRE humans to be on planet for over a year…nearly 2 in fact, IIRC. And humans are MUCH more mobile than any probe that lands on any planet. They are also much more adaptable since they don’t need to have a programmer or controller figure everything out ahead of time or on the fly for them to do. That’s because ultimately it’s humans who ARE controlling the probes, just with a 40+ minute time lag and limited visual input and mobility issues.
Costs are a fraction, you are right about that, but I think that the gains are a fraction as well. A real manned mission to Mars would accomplish everything that all of these robotic missions (the lander missions that is) combined in the space of the single manned mission. It WOULD cost many times the total cost of all those unmanned missions, and of course there would be far greater risks (if you crater an unmanned probe you are just out a few billion at most…crater a manned mission and you cost lives), but we’d get more out of it, IMHO.
-XT
I’d like to send somebody along to change the tires as so as we can.
I’m all for rovers now and astronauts as we find out how.
I think we should send humans to Mars eventually, but it doesn’t need to be the next problem we tackle. I’d be perfectly happy to put it on hold until we have cheap access to space (something I plausibly hope to see in my lifetime). Once we have that, we’d be hard-pressed to find reasons not to go.
Are you really trying to say that robots are no better today than in 1968? That they would be incapable of landing a probe, taking rocks and returning them to earth? What else did Apollo astronauts accomplish that Curiosity could not?
Curiosity’s power generator is the latest by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator and will generate 2.5 kilowatt hours per day - not bound by solar like previous rovers. With that constraint, it can perform collect data 24/7. It will not be taking breaks to eat, shit or sleep. It will not need to take breaks to gather resources to survive.
I think your comments are equally horsehit.
[QUOTE=This_Just_In…]
Are you really trying to say that robots are no better today than in 1968? That they would be incapable of landing a probe, taking rocks and returning them to earth? What else did Apollo astronauts accomplish that Curiosity could not?
[/QUOTE]
Um, no…I’m not saying that at all. I’m not sure what other way to say what I’ve already said twice now, but if you are going to make claims about how unmanned missions would have done better than Apollo then you have to compare the technologies available at the time for an apples to apples comparison.
I don’t know if we have probes capable of bringing back hundreds of pounds of rocks today (probably if you were willing to spend enough you could…but then it might not be that much of a savings over the manned missions :p), but they certainly didn’t WHEN WE WERE DOING THE APOLLO MISSIONS.
You are attempting to compare Apollo missions that happened in the 60’s and 70’s to unmanned missions that are happening now or in the last decade. What could the Apollo astronauts accomplish that Curiosity could not (decades later)? Well, bringing back tons of samples for one thing. Seeing an unusual rock while wandering around and being able to grab said rock to return it. Being able to multi-task missions…do soil samples, do multiple experiments, set up laser reflectors and myriad other things, and do it in only a couple of days. And they were doing that 3 decades ago. A better question is, what could astronauts TODAY do on Mars that 20 Curiosity missions couldn’t. And the answer is, IMHO, ‘lots’. A mission today would have access to all the technology we could put on it. ROV’s would probably play a big role, both ground and air. They’d have a rover with a range greater than all of your robotic missions combined (hell, they could walk as far as some of the unmanned missions). They would have a lab right there to test samples and do biology, chemistry and geology, instead of trying to stuff the data back from Mars to here and then having someone look at. And they would be doing this stuff for months or over a year.
And it’s fully autonomous? And has some sort of instantaneous communications link with unlimited bandwidth back to Earth? Does it have a pony too? Does it have a fully field science lab on site? Does it have the ability to be curious and go look at that rock over there to the right that looks interesting if it’s programmed to go to the left? Or does someone need to tell it to go look at that interesting rock to the right, assuming some operator saw it?
Well, you are not alone, I’m sure. 
-XT
No, but why is that a bad thing? It costs a miniscule fraction for a few guys to sit at a desk and give it further instructions compared to sending that guy to Mars.
But, robots are actually becoming more and more autonomous. In the not so distant future I would imagine there will be mostly autonomous robotic probes.
And Curiosity will do things by itself, like avoid hazards as it is driving around.
“The Hazard Avoidance Cameras (also called Hazcams) are used for autonomous hazard avoidance during rover drives and for safe positioning of the robotic arm on rocks and soils. The cameras will use visible light to capture stereoscopic three-dimensional (3-D) imagery. The cameras have a 120 degree field of view and map the terrain at up to 10 feet (3 meters) in front of the rover.”
Actually, it pretty much does have a full science lab on site.
You should watch this video, it is going to be pretty cool.
No pony though. But I doubt manned missions would bring a pony either.
The fact is, artificial intelligence is rapidly progressing and arguing that people are fiscally superior to robots to do tasks in such challenging environments is going to be more of a losing argument with each passing year. Your biggest argument is the ability to return rocks? Curiosity just analyzes the rocks on site - no big need to return it to earth. It does soil samples. It does multiple experiments. If desired, I’m sure they could have attached a tool on it to set up laser reflectors. And it does a myriad of other things.
That is a cool video. I still would like to see men go there in my lifetime.
[QUOTE=This_Just_In…]
No, but why is that a bad thing? It costs a miniscule fraction for a few guys to sit at a desk and give it further instructions compared to sending that guy to Mars.
[/QUOTE]
It’s not a ‘bad thing’…it just goes towards whatever point you thought you were making about astronauts having to eat, shit, sleep and such. It means that the things aren’t in fact running 24/7/688…in fact, given past missions, they spend a lot of time simply driving to places folks back at mission control THINK might be interesting. And, of course, getting themselves out of problems that they encounter. They aren’t sitting there just ‘doing science’ the entire time.
They could become fully automated and it still won’t matter because they aren’t going to be sitting there doing science 24 hours a day all year long. Also, the DATA is going to have to be sent back to the Earth and then processed for it to be any good, which takes time in an of itself, even discounting command instructions. They also aren’t going to be curious…they are going to do basically what they were programmed to do. They aren’t going to look around just for the hell of it and maybe see something that the programmers back on Earth included in their instruction sets.
And while it’s doing those sorts of tasks it won’t be doing science or gathering data…sort of like those sleeping astronauts, right? Look, you brought this up. The fact is that Curiosity is going to have downtime as well, and when you look at mobility and what it can do in any given amount of time it’s going to be less than what a couple of humans and a rover can cover. What’s it’s basic speed and range for a day, for instance? A mile? Less? More? And during that mile (more or less), how much science is it doing while traversing that distance? How quickly can it perform an experiment?
Robots are really good at some tasks, like highly automated and rote tasks. They aren’t so good at the unexpected, as you can see in earlier probes that got stuck in sand and took days to get out of that sort of situation. Days when it wasn’t just ‘doing science’…it wasn’t doing anything in fact.
Nope, they won’t have a pony…but they WILL have a human on board that can do some of the data processing on site, and be able to make snap decisions about things they find. Presumably even if NASA sends all astronauts, at least one of them will be fully qualified geologists, for instance, who can both use the lab they take with them AND even cobble something else together if the situation arises. Something a single probe can’t do. I don’t care how full the testing and data gathering equipment is on Curiosity is, you can only fit so much on something that small. While a manned mission is going to have not only more equipment with them, but the humans will be right there.
Like I said, it costs less to do the unmanned probe, but no matter how you slice it you get less out of any single mission, regardless of how cool it is. I’m not dissing Curiosity…I think it’s way cool, as I did the other unmanned missions. I LOVE them, and since, politically it’s all we can probably expect, it’s better than nothing. But there is just no comparison between what a manned mission COULD do, and what any one of these probes can do…or even what all of the probes so far HAVE done.
The fact is that artificial intelligence isn’t there yet, and it might be decades before it is…if ever. They are finding it’s a lot harder to build artificial intelligence systems to do real world tasks than they thought it would be. In the DARPA challenge to control a vehicle (on Earth) over a course autonomously, most of the vehicles failed over a course that a teen ager wouldn’t find all that challenging.
No, my biggest argument isn’t ‘the ability to return rocks’, and frankly if that’s all you’ve gotten out of what I’ve written so far then I’m wasting my time here. If you really think that Curiosity can do everything a manned mission could do then I don’t really know what to say to you, except that you are wrong. It does a fraction of what a manned mission could do at a fraction of the cost would be my ‘biggest argument’, if you haven’t been able to follow what I’ve been saying in this thread.
-XT
I fully understand the intangible ‘cool’ factor that would be felt watching people land on Mars.
But, with limited dollars to spend, so much more science can be learned by sending out planetary probes, telescopes and other sensors. Personally I would so prefer the ‘cool’ factor I’d feel watching videos of future probes exploring Jupiter’s moons and reading about the universe explained as the next generation Hubble discovers ???.
Or all that money could instead be used on a manned Mar’s mission and all you get is some guy giving the same damn interview about what he’s eating, how he sleeps and what he does with his shit - because his survival is what is taking up almost all of his time.
You are vastly over-rating how much time they would have to spend simply surviving. I don’t know what you think a Mars mission would be, but they wouldn’t be in crisis every moment they aren’t eating or shitting (which seems important to you for some reason). Nor do I think they will spend almost two years doing interviews where they simply talk about what they are eating or the color of their shit, contrary to your apparent belief.
To me it boils down to whether we want to explore Mars for another few decades at the current rate and hopefully in that time get some of the fundamental answers, or if we want to go and find them directly and stop screwing around. We’ve been doing the ‘send a robot to Mars, hope it doesn’t crater in, find out what’s within a few miles of where the probe landed, hope it’s interesting, rinse and repeat’ way for over a decade now. We still don’t know the answers to the most basic question of whether there is or was life on Mars. My guess is that within a month of a manned mission with qualified astronauts with specialties in fields like biology and geology, we’d know the answer to that and be on the way to exploring new fields of inquiry that would open up with the answers we’ve found…even though the astronauts would have to eat, sleep and shit while finding those answers.
-XT
Why is it, that in a thread specifically started to discuss manned space exploration, that the unmanned advocates come piling on?
When the OP’s question is “Should we go to Mars?”, responses along the lines of “Perhaps not for a while, and here’s why” should be admitted.
The last 4 words of the OP: Is it worth it?
Manned vs unmanned cuts right to the heart of that. Is it economically or scientifically worth it? Clearly, there’s a huge debate on that.
Is the “cool” factor worth it? I say yes (even if I come down on the unmanned side of things), but there’s clearly a debate there, too.