Commission Suggests UK Should End Astronaut Ban 233
An anonymous reader writes "According to the BBC a British scientific panel has recommended that the British Government should end its ban on human space flight. The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Commission pursued a 9-month investigation into 'The Scientific Case for Human Space Flight'. Professor Frank Close, Chair of the Commission, said, 'We commenced this study without preconceived views and with no formal connection to planetary exploration. Our personal backgrounds made us lean towards an initial skepticism on the scientific value of human involvement in such research.' The commission concluded that 'profound scientific questions relating to the history of the solar system and the existence of life beyond Earth can best - perhaps only - be achieved by human exploration on the Moon or Mars, supported by appropriate automated systems.'"
It wasn't BANNED.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:ehhh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, we are exploring the surface of planets. If was can put a small group of ppl on mars for 5 years, then the amount of exploration that is accomplished is many times more than what is possible by remote vehicles. the same is true of the moon. We can easily get in and do the job.
Right Answer, Wrong Reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
That's cool stuff and all, but I'm something of a pragmatist, so hopefully I won't offend too many of the resident idealist when I suggest that the previously enumerated justifications don't hold water as far as spending billions on a space program goes.
Knowing the history of solar system has next to zero humanitarian worth. And while maybe, just maybe finding alien life could yield some pharmaceutical benefits, all present evidence indicates that life is a localized earth phenomena. There is not much reason to expect to find any microbes on Titan or Mars or anywhere else except for hopeful thinking. Which is fine, and maybe there's a full fledged intelligent civilization living under ice sheets on one of the Jovian moons, but you don't send an expedition to the back of the moon looking for the Fountain of Youth just because it might be there.
That's not to say this knowledge doesn't have any worth. It has aesthetic worth, like the Sistine Chapel. Heck, as a student of physics, my defining goal is to further elucidate the nature of the universe. Personally, I assosciate an incredible worth with knowing more about its formation.
But I wouldn't support my government spending billions on an art project, even one I would appreciate, and likewise, I don't think 'history of the solar system' is likely to be the best allocation of the funds.
Now, colonizing space is a whole nother spiel as far as justifying an investment. I think there are immense humanitarian benefits inherit to that--many, as exampled by the U.S. space program, that will arise sheerly incidental to the effort without us having any idea about them beforehand. Zero gravity refinement of synthetic materials, solar mirrors to assist in growing crops (and maybe dissipating hurricanes?), extending our habitat to deal with overcrowding... these all seem like things that a wealthy government might be doing its people a favor by investing in.
Little risk (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, with the success rate to date, from Blue Streak to Beagle 2, the chance of a British astronaut getting out of the atmosphere in one piece is so low that anybody volunteering for a space program needs a quick trip to a secure mental health unit instead.
Re:ehhh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Japan, Europe and Israel, for example, have very good space programs with no manned flights, but none of them saw the need to ban it.
Is it like the old joke -
"In America, everything which is not banned is legal.
In Germany, everything which is not allowed is illegal.
In Soviet Russia, everything which is not banned is mandatory."
"In Britain, everything which is not worth doing is banned."?
Does this ban extend to private spaceflight as well?
Why does space exploration have to be scientific? (Score:2, Insightful)
Come on! If that's right, then the UK should also ban everything else that is not accompanied by a team of ressearchers, including the average person simply getting out of bed in the morning.
Space exploration has much more to offer than simple scientific knowledge. It is known that the Earth will eventually perish, when the sun explodes into a red giant, so space exploration offers, at least, survival of the species!
Also, there are currently more than 6 billion people on this planet. We cannot sustain that. And I really don't trust that we, as a species, are capable of adjusting our lifestyles to become sustainable. So, spave exploration is inevitable!
You simply can't ban something which is inevitable!
Hmmmm..... (Score:3, Insightful)
No they don't have a point. The ISS it self has had a number of problems but calling the basic idea of an ISS a waste of money because one of the implementations of that idea sucks is plain stupid. Like any other elementary scientific research (be it in physics, genetics, mathematics, computing....the list goes on), studying the problems of manned space exploration requires the vision to see that the knowledge gained from experimental installations we are building today will perhaps only be useful some 50 or even 100 years from now. In fact some of the uses we find for this knowledge will be things we cannot not dream of today. The ISS and manned space flight in general may not serve much of a practical, profit generating purpose today and this will probably be true for decades to come but that is not the point. The point is that the ISS and manned space flight in general is fundamental research that we are going to need the day we have advanced far enought to enable us to economically travel to other parts of our solar system. It is easy to point a finger at projects like this one and call it a waste of money the tough bit is opening your eyes and seeing the benefits farther down the road.
UK get babyish again... (Score:2, Insightful)
I live there, but what a typical European move, they have one so we've got one. I'd bet that if the manned Chinese flight had fucked up, we be hearing "Oh! Well, we have a non manned flight policy!"
Secondly, which Briton in his right mind will volenteer for a manned Brit spaceflight, the last unmanned one we sent up (first in like 20 years, my god the hype they made about it), The Beagle, just went wrong! Not one part worked...
Re:Money (Score:2, Insightful)
He went high, but not fast. Shooting payload 300 miles up isn't too difficult. What is harder (truly exponentially harder, due to the rocket equation [wikipedia.org]) is reaching orbital velocity.
Re:Maybe the ban was on "Astronauts"... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Simple: UK has no suitable launch sites (Score:2, Insightful)
I really, really can't imagine the Australians selling us back a plot of land. If the launch site was on Australian soil then our perception would be that it was an Australian programme. The UK already has plenty of places where we are "partners" in a space programme, none of which give us sufficient national pride to care about manned travel. The proud Brit striding aboard a rocket with his Union Jack uniform doesn't seem so proud when he's having to launch from a site which flies a different flag.
All of a sudden it isn't "our" space programme, we're just hitching a ride.
There's also the dreadful uncomfortable sinking feeling that us Brits get whenever we have to ask for favours from our commonwealth ex-empire chums. Y'know how Americans feel absolutely awful about Vietnam? It's kind of the same thing. The fact of the matter is that we did a lot of very unpleasant things in our empire that would be totally unacceptable today, and we'd be grateful if people just accepted our apologies and didn't draw any more attention to it.
The idea of us going around ex-empire nations asking for a rocket launch site brings back some pretty unpleasant memories. The nations themselves may well be happy about it, but we'd feel rather overbearing. It just has a nasty ring of menace about it, as if we'd have the Royal Navy sitting along the coast just in case the "diplomacy" didn't go well. Now you and I may appreciate that we'd never do anything of the sort, but we don't even want to bring up those kinds of images. We'd prefer that those kinds of suspicions were never even stirred up.
Imagine we did buy some land off Australia, that we could fly our own flag on. How long before there is some huge publicty nightmare about the UK returning to the bad old days of stealing land off native peoples? (For instance, I was going to use the phrase "we must be seen to be whiter than white" in the previous paragraph, but even that has a nasty racist ring to it.)
It's not that we don't like Australia, we love you chaps, you're our best mates. It's just that we don't feel it's good karma to go asking for favours, given that we've cocked things up in the past, and in any case we'd get more pride if we could do it on our own.
Re:Money (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:From the country that taught us (Score:3, Insightful)
I would mod you but you are already at +5 so I'll comment. I couldn't agree more with what you say. Bang for pound sending people into space seems like a very expensive luxury at the minute. Even if we say that there are spin-offs from sending people into space I think it's expensive.
In fact I would go as far as to say there are very few spin-offs from sending people into space for one very good reason. No one wants to see astronauts die so all the technology that is used is very tried tested. With a robotic mission no one gets killed if it goes wrong (although some heads roll) so there is more of an incentive to be a little adventurous.
I would much rather see the money being spent directly on basic research. I think there is potential for developing some very exotic new materials and some interesting advances in biology. Not to mention innovation in power production. All areas that could do with £200 million a year.
Sad statement (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it was considered by just about every scientist alive at the time of Apollo that there was absolutely no scientific value in sending a man to the Moon. Not just British scientists but Americian scientists too held this opinion. Many still hold this opinion today.
This is such a sad statement, and inaccurate. The Apollo missions were incredibly productive. The first geological exploration another world? 6 missions exploring amazingly diverse sites. Apollo contibuted greatly geomorphology, volcanology, geochemistry, isotope studies, remnote sensing, mapping... The Apollo mission reports are still available [amazon.com]. Read them. I doubt you will feel the same way. As a former planetary geologist I can assure you that that opinion is not widespread in that community.
If you say this about Apollo, what do you think about the pointless research on the even more expensive space station?
Re:ehhh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is about the UK government helping fund human space flight. Which means that they could be working with any of the established space programs.
Mistakes and poor logic (Score:3, Insightful)
Um...aren't the SRBs already human-rated? They are used on the Shuttle Transport System, after all, the entirety of which is human-rated.
I think what you meant to say is that the second stage for the "Scotty" rocket, or single stick booster topped by humans, will need to be built and human-rated.
Also, you are underestimating the work that is involved with the Heavy Lift vehicle. You say: That is nothing more than moving the 3 engines from the shuttle to 5 on the bottom of the fuel tank. There's a LOT of engineering that has to go into that. First of all, the O2 and the hydrogen go through feul conduits on the side of the external tank, not down to the bottom; the feul lines (which are 12" diameter) will have to be routed through the tanks. Since the tanks are built to withstand the pressure of the warming cryogenic liquids, this is no small task. Additionally, the structure of the external tank is built to withstand forces from hanging the weight of the Orbiter on the side; the entire tank will need to be tweaked very carefully to withstand longitudinal loads of having engines on the bottom but the payload on the top.
Finally, your comparison of the Shuttle's payload to the heavy lift's payload isn't a good one either--the orbiter weighs something in excess of 60 metric tons, and should be included in the payload amount. It does go into orbit, after all, that's why they call it the Orbiter. If you just removed that and side-mounted a payload bay right now, you could get 80 metric tons into orbit no problem, without redesign of the external tank, and without extending the boosters to five segments, and you'd be using the safest, simplest parts of the Shuttle system..
Pity that it's only around 80 tons, that's not really enough to get to the Moon with the architecture that NASA has right now.
Oh, and the difference between 60 miles and 300 miles isn't actually 240 miles--orbital velocity is sideways velocity, otherwise you just go up and then fall back down into the same general area. The ide is to move sideways fast enough that when you fall, you fall around the Earth, not back to it. To do a suborbital flight you don't need to go very fast. To go into orbit, the minimum velocity is about 7.5 km/sec, and a Lunar flight requires about 11.5 km/sec. The differences are staggering, especially when you think about the problem of slowing down from 11.5 km/sec!
Re:UK get babyish again... (Score:3, Insightful)
-everphilski-
No jam for me! (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. I mean, why send people into space. After all, don't those satellites fix themselves. Hubble almost certainly has required no human interaction. Even if it did, it was of no scientific value. Obviously sending and/or building on our only natural satellite could only end up just as fruitless. And, sex only for the purpose of procreation. Otherwise it has no value. Jam on toast? I'll take the dry white toast any day! Computers for the common peasant, but what would they need with a computer?
Yes, that's sarcasm. If it wasn't, someone shoot me.
An unimaginative scientist that can't find the scientific value in the exploration of the unknown... I think that disqualifies them for the title "scientist". One can argue the cost all day, but to argue the scientific value of exploration... unscientific exploration is the very definition of oxymoron. It is, I looked it up and everything.