The Wrong Stuff 668
b00le writes "The New York Review of Books has a trenchant piece,
The Wrong Stuff by the great Steven Weinberg, arguing against the utility of manned spaceflight, which he feels has a largely political or sentimental function. He adds: '...I have taken the President's space initiative seriously. That may be a mistake.' Even so, his argument is detailed and rich in facts, particularly the nasty economic kind."
Damn straight... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Damn straight... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Damn straight... (Score:2)
arguing against manned space missions? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, the horror.
*Houston, we have a problem.
He's right (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:He's right (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We do Need to Escape (Score:3, Informative)
103 = 20%, then 515 = 100%.
So we need 5 times as many reactors. Hmmm.....
So to power the ENTIRE WORLD, we need:
441 = 16%, 2756.25 = 100%. I don't know where we'll put 1/
Re:He's right (Score:2, Insightful)
Some of the previous posters have mentioned exploring our world more and that's fine too. I just think that approaching both unknowns makes sense as long as it has t
This is a fight that shouldn't be fought. (Score:4, Insightful)
For geologic work however, humans just plain do a better job. The current two probes, God bless them, would have been pretty much useless if humans were up there instead. To grossly over simplify it, I want the most megabytes for my buck. If a human can send back 100 megabytes of scientific data as opposed to 10 from a robot, send the human. if it's the other way around, send the robotic probe.
This shouldn't he a fight of man vs. machine. It should be an intelligent decision of whom or what to send on a particular mission. For some it will be humans and for some robots. They are not mutually exclusive for space exploration.
Bang for the buck (Score:5, Interesting)
Then you want the unmanned missions. Google around for it. You will be amazed at the huge disparity in costs, manned vs unmanned. Absolutely all science done on the space station or any manned platform could have been done by robots (other than science on humans in space). Every science claim that NASA has made by humans in space could have been done by robots or on the ground. Even their big perfect crystal claims have been shown to be overblown, they never made crystals in space that could not have been made on the ground or by machines in space.
As for cost, look at these rovers, what, $200M each or both? A manned mission would be a hundred times as expensive, and altho it might well return more data, it would not necessarily return a lot more useful data. A hundred signs of ancient water is not much more convincng than the few found by the rovers.
If you want bang for the buck, you want machines.
Now me, the only reason that I think proper for humans in space is adventure and tourism. All that guff about spreading to a different planet or star to have redundancy in case of a comet disaster wiping us out, well great, it ain't going to happen on the current crop of expensive launchers, it's going to happen because tourists flood the orbital hotels and cities and want to take trips to Mars, not because a few humans take a long expensive "science" trip.
Re:Bang for the buck (Score:3, Insightful)
Two humans could have done everything the two current probes have done in the past two months in a few hours tops. It would cost more but in the two year stay that humans would undertake, they would produce tens of thousands of times the scientific data that machines would. It's not just volume either but quality. Hav
Re:Bang for the buck (Score:3, Insightful)
Just how much of the moon's surface do you think the manned missions there explored? Humans in space don't have all the much more latitude for exploration than robots at this time--everything they do is carefully planned out ahead of time because it's really hard
Re:Bang for the buck (Score:3, Informative)
It's written by an actual rocket scientist and he is very good at laying out the numbers without taking leaps like "it's 100 times as far so it'll cost 100 times as much".
Re:He's right (Score:4, Insightful)
My point is, sure - Bush is probably saying all of this because he's motivated by creating a legacy. Does that mean our initial achievement of putting a man on the moon was worthless, because President Kennedy had similar ideas in his head when that was done?
Presidents aren't scientists or researchers. They're never going to have the same reasons for doing what they do.... The important thing is that useful research gets done, and people advance in knowledge and ability as times goes on.
I read the "Wrong Stuff" article, and there are valid points in it. But at the same time, it occurs to me that spending money to send computerized, unmanned probes and rockets all over the galaxy has limited usefulness too. Sure, we can get back some pretty pictures, and if we cross our fingers and hope every little detail was properly planned in advance, the craft will perform a few preset tasks for us. But right now, we have no substitute for human intelligence and adaptability. If plans change or something isn't quite right, you can talk to a human on the radio and say "Hey Jim, how about we try this instead of plan A?" That option's not often there with an unmanned probe, or some rocket with a chimp in it.
Not only that, but we still won't be ready for the most sensible long-term goal of all... colonizing another planet, if we haven't worked with live, human missions for years first.
moving mass quantities of people (Score:5, Insightful)
Sending DNA is the only likely method of colonizing extrasolar planets. No giant colony ships, no band of hardy explorers in "hypersleep".
Besides, AI is just around the corner. I read about in Popular Science in 1975.
Re:He's right (Score:5, Insightful)
The new space iniitiave will dump those billions of dollars into the economy (into the tech. economy specifically). Most of that money will go pay for workers in the program who will be in the US, since space still also has a strategic interest as well.
When people say "better things to spend the money" on, you have to realize that if you mean welfare type programs, they'll be hiring bureaucrats and social workers, not tech. workers.
Re:He's right (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He's right (Score:3, Interesting)
If humans never develop the technology for interstellar space travel, in about 500 million years there will be no "elsewhere" to spend the money.
While I must agree, Bush's "vision" has nothing to do with the space program and everything to do with election year, the point is that if you're for the survival of the human race, nothing is more important than the space program.
Humans are currently trapped on this litt
Re:He's right (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He's right (Score:3, Insightful)
People who say that soldiers knew about the duty are missing the point. Troops have signed on to defend their country. They are willing to die to defend their country. When you send them out to get killed
Re:He's right (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think I could find a better reason to die.
Those who feign "sympathy" for the troops are pretty arrogant, ignorant, or both. We all die, eventually. Most here will die after pissing their lives away in front of a computer screen, criticizing events and men of which they know nothing.
That's the pathetic waste of life, if you ask me.
Honor those who died. Don't use them as fodder fo
Re:He's right (Score:4, Interesting)
The sympathy for the GIs in Iraq who are facing the possibility of death every day is not feigned at all. It's a horrible job. No sane soldier wants to die in battle, ever -- anyone who does is much more of a threat to himself and his unit than he is to the enemy. Like Patton said, "Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to go out there and manke the other son of a bitch die for his country." A glorious death may be a useful recruiting tool for idealistic 18-year-olds, but that fantasy tends to wear off pretty damn fast the first time you actually see someone get shot.
I considered it a great honor to serve my country. I'm proud of my service. But what I'm proud of is that I saved lives -- not that my parents had to worry for months that they would get their son home in a body bag.
Mistake?!? (Score:3, Funny)
Isn't it a mistake to take anything G. W. Bush says seriously...?
Re:Mistake?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what you want about him, but the man is a deadly serious True Believer. His belief is so strong and serious that even facts don't often get in the way.
Spinoffs (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Spinoffs (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, I had a glass of Tang just this morning.
Re:Like what? (Score:2, Informative)
Cost of Lifting Things (Score:5, Interesting)
Once we have the new technology, space will be roughly on par with ocean exploration for cost.
Re:Cost of Lifting Things (Score:5, Interesting)
Single Stage to orbit, airbreathing, lands and takes off like a conventional aeroplane. A snip at $10 billion (R&D- ticket price would be about a not-totally-unreasonable $100,000).
It doesn't seem to require any handwavium or unobtainium unlike (at the moment at least) the Space Elevator [everything2.com].
Incremental advances seem unlikely to do it - it requires an orders-of-magnitude shift in cost.
That may well happen though. Some new launchers like SpaceX [spacex.com] promises to be quite a bit cheaper- a combination of higher launch volume and real reductions in price due to improved vehicle design very probably can drop us by that much.
Don't count your chickens (Score:5, Interesting)
I know of over a hundred promised vehicles over the past 50 years that have made many of the same promises as Skylon and failed to deliver, so call me when it's flying.
Off the top of my head... Roton, X-33, Conestoga, Kelly Spaceplane, Wernher Von Braun's shuttle, the space shuttle, Buran, Kistler, and more.
Re:Cost of Lifting Things (Score:3, Insightful)
Chicken, meet Egg. Egg, Chicken.
Re:Cost of Lifting Things (Score:5, Insightful)
Weinberg's point is not that space flight is too expensive; his point is that manned space flight is too expensive and that the gains of sending a person along are marginal.
The figure that he cites it that it costs $3,000 per pound of payload for an unmanned rocket, and $10,000 per pound for the Space Shuttle.
Granted, the unmanned rocket is not cheap, but the manned flights cost more than three times as much.
Re:Cost of Lifting Things (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cost of Lifting Things (Score:3, Insightful)
The SSME is probably the most magnificent piece of high performance rocket engineering achieved by man to date. It pushes the limits of what is possible with chemical propulsion. But it achieves that high performance at the cost of incredible complexity, and a design that may be operational, but is certainly not operable (in the sense that it supports overall system opera
Economics? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Economics? (Score:5, Interesting)
Economics? Indeed ...
Mr. Weinberg isn't talking economics. He is, after all, a physicist. On actually reading the full article, you see arguments against the actual scientific utility of space travel. Arguments such as these:
Much of the "scientific" program assigned to astronauts on the space shuttle and the space station has the flavor of projects done for a high school science talent contest. Some of the work looks interesting, but it is hard to see why it has to be done by people.
...
Looking into the future, we need to ask, what scientific work can be done by astronauts on Mars? They can walk around and look at the terrain, and carry out tests on rocks, looking for signs of water or life, but all that can be done by robots. They can bring back rock samples, as the Apollo astronauts did from the moon, but that too can be done by robots.
...
It is hoped that while vast sums are being spent on manned space flight missions, a little money will be diverted to real science. I think that this attitude is self-defeating. Whenever NASA runs into trouble, it is science that is likely to be sacrificed first. After NASA had pushed the Apollo program to the point where people stopped watching lunar landings on television, it canceled Apollo 18 and 19, the missions that were to be specifically devoted to scientific research.
Re:Economics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Economics? (Score:4, Funny)
Spaceflight as a religious endeavour (Score:5, Insightful)
The only argument that manned spaceflight must be undertaken is that the Sun will eventually go nova and destroy the Earth; consequently, we had better think of a way off. Since we don't anticipate this happening within the next hundred years, however, and we do anticipate the continued advance of technology, why not ignore the question for a few hundred years and then start investigating manned spaceflight (at much less effort required)?
The answer, for many space enthusiasts, is that manned spaceflight is simply a thing which must happen, because it must. And this kind of irrational "it exists because it exists" principle is the same that many claim to despise in religion.
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour (Score:5, Interesting)
The only argument that manned spaceflight must be undertaken is that the Sun will eventually go nova and destroy the Earth...
Current thinking isn't that a nova will destroy the Earth, since novae are usually associated with compact objects like white dwarfs. Instead, the death of life on Earth will occur when the Sun goes through its red giant phase, expanding to such a degree that it envelops the Earth. This expansion, which is due to happen in about 5 billion years, won't be a rapid event; it will take a few million years. So the Sci-Fi books that have the Sun exploding are just plain wrong.
Simple Explanation (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sure space travel will become (by necessity if nothing else) more common in a few hundred years - but I'll be dead.
As manned space travel becomes more common the likelyhood that Joe Average might be able to 'go up' increases - so I'd guess the reason for a push for manned missions has nothing to do with science or pride, but that deep inside, we all want
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour (Score:2)
Do you really think that a few hundred colonists on the Moon or on Mars would be able to perpetuate humanity? How about a few thousand?
Re:Spaceflight as a religious endeavour (Score:3, Interesting)
While as little as a few dozen would contain the requisite genetic diversity to repopulate the earth, you aren't thinking right... It's relatively expensive to sustain life on earth because of the high gravity. The necessary maintenance diet is in the thousands of calories, but on the Moon, for example, it would be far smaller. At the same time, the moon isn't hamper
Robert L. Park (Score:5, Informative)
Weinberg's opinion is no news. Bob Park [aps.org] already said it in his book Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud [amazon.com] and in his testimony [house.gov] before the Commitee on Sicence, Subcommitee on Space and Aeronautics (April 9th, 1997)
Not necessary, yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Manned space flight for the purposes of science and exploration is not necessary yet. We've proven with the great success of the recent Mars rover missions that we don't need to endanger humans to explore our immediate neighborhood. The basic things we want to study on other planets can be studied by a robot.
If people want to cowboy around in space, fine. Privatize it, build up a space tourism industry, and take the risks that way. But when you lose human lives on the government's dollar, you risk shutting down scientific progress for years while the government "investigates".
Re:Not necessary, yet (Score:2, Insightful)
There are just things we can't discover about Mars without having guys crawling around in the dirt with rock hammers. An army of robots on the surface of Mars will *NEVER* be able to do all the science that just one hum
Re:Not necessary, yet (Score:2)
To paraphrase Bob Zubrin: you could fire a thousand Mars Rovers into the richest fossil beds on earth, and they'd be still looking for fossils when the next ice age came and glaciers crushed them (because, of course, at the speed they move they couldn't outrun them).
Humans are still needed, directly, at the very frontier of the search for life on Mars (and if a "second genesis" doesn't excite you scientifically then nothing can) picking
a question of goals (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:a question of goals (Score:3, Interesting)
If we are serious about getting our eggs out of this basket then we need to start workin
1 Trillion Dollars (Score:5, Informative)
Re:1 Trillion Dollars (Score:3, Informative)
Every little mistake adds to the cost. There is almost no opportunity to reduce the cost figures, but there is no limit on increased costs. Both the space shuttle and the ISS cost more than an order of magnitude more than initial estimates. The article seems to think that the Mars cost estimate should be < 10% of a
Re:1 Trillion Dollars (Score:3, Interesting)
However, a book is still just handwaving. He asserts that it can be done for 1.5 orders of magnitude less then $1T, and I'm pointing out that mega-aerospace projects often exceed initial cost estimates by 1.5 orders of magnitude. (Or would exceed the cost if finished. The majority of large space projects started in the last 40 years were ca
Irony (Score:3, Funny)
I agree completely and I also think Weinberg is quite intelligent.
Of course, the irony here is that Weinberg himself was motivated by economic arguments to move in 1982 from Harvard to the University of Texas, which could afford a prestigious Nobel Laureate because of oil money.
That would be the same U.S. state and the same industry that supports the current U.S. President who is proposing this space program.
Asteroid Mining (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Asteroid Mining (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Asteroid Mining (Score:2, Insightful)
*To be honest, I really have no idea if the numbers are even remotely accurate. I'm just trying to make a point
Re:Asteroid Mining (Score:2, Insightful)
"All that would be required is an ionic ramjet.."
Yeah, we just gotta invent (a decent version of) that first!
Re:Asteroid Mining (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember, it is much easier to send up our
Re:Asteroid Mining (Score:3, Insightful)
Good arguing tactic... I wonder what you call that?
I don't know what a years income in 1850 was, but lets ssay 10 grand, to keep the math simple. So, over 150 years, the cost has gone down about 50 fold, roughly.
My grandfather, when he was 15, bought a used car for $10. But, this is really apples and oranges. "Gone down 50 fold" has very little meaning. Today, anybody with a minimum wage job can journey cross country for much less than 1 week's wages. (Greyhound "anywher
A waste? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A waste? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm all for sending people up to space after we can send our citizenry through school at a 12th grade math and reading level.
Did you know they're revising policies so kids can't get held back for being behind in math or science anymore, and so kids are automatically promoted ahead a grade if they've already been held back in the past? Let's fix this crap back hom
The most important aspect of space travel... (Score:3, Interesting)
wrong premise (Score:4, Insightful)
But, although economic viability is important to create a mass-usuage of space(travel), I fail to see why it should be the only possible motive to start exploring space. It's a pretty narrowminded, materialistic and typical capitalistic view on things. It's the same view that makes progress on medication for very rare diseases so slow: corporations can't see how they are ever going to get profit out of it, so they all turn their backs on it.
If ppl (including states) are only going to do something when they are sure of an immediate profitable return, the world has become a sad place. (And we should leave it the sooner
Arguments based on such a viewpoint fail to recognise other incentives apart from economical ones.
America wouldn't exist without manned exploration. (Score:2)
Arguments in favour of manned spaceflight (Score:5, Interesting)
However, there is much to be gained from manned missions to Mars, or from having a base on the moon. If anything, we will learn a good deal about doing manned deep space missions, and we may even learn how to do them cheaper or more efficiently. We will have to do a great many new things to accomplish these missions, which some people see as a risk. I see these not as risks, but as opportunities to push the envelope and advance the science of space flight. For too long we have been doing (relatively) safe, boring missions using proven technology like the ISS, Space Shuttle, Proton, Ariane, Soyuz and so on. All that is fine for commercial missions, but it does little to advance the science. What we need is to do new things and learn from them. I believe manned missions should be part of that, precisely because of the challenges and risks involved... one learns by doing things that are hard and untried, not by sticking with easy and safe challenges.
Lastly, mr. Weinberg refers a few times to the 'drama of people in space', as the reason why NASA and politicians are so keen on manned space flight. I see that 'drama' as a very useful spin-off: something to capture the imagination of the people, and perhaps even inspire them to pursue a career and education in aerospace or other technical vocations.
Re:Arguments in favour of manned spaceflight (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a cyclic argument: manned space flight is good because it teaches us how to do manned space flight.
Not very convincing.
Re:Arguments in favour of manned spaceflight (Score:2)
You're partly right... but it makes sense in light of the argument of manned space flight being too expensive. We shouldn't be put off too much by today's price tag, because by doing these missions we will learn how to do future ones more cheaply. However, if we say "manned space flight is too expensive" and not do any more missions, it will likely remain too expensive in the foreseeable future be
Neither right nor wrong: just necessary (Score:3, Interesting)
I think space exploration is a necessity and not a commodity. The complete ecological system is so fragile and many parameters (asteroids, energy output of the sun) are out of human control that it would be negligent not to secure the prolonged human existence by going into space.
You may argue, that if the human race destroys their homeplanet, the fate would be deserved. But i believe, that you can only learn from a lesson you (as individual or race) survive.
Regards, Martin
Noah's Ark (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Noah's Ark (Score:5, Funny)
Personned Space Travel (Score:2)
Just now, it is not very feasable economically. As technology progresses, it will become safer and cheaper, and more routine.
Give it a few more years (50 or so) and things will be vastly different. I just hope we are able to build our Noah's Ark before the Flood (i.e. asteroid impact) comes.
Re:Personned Space Travel (Score:3, Informative)
The first moon landing was 35 years ago this coming July. In that interval, we have lost our ability to put people on the moon and the price-per-pound for large payloads to LEO has changed very little. Why should things change in the next 50? So long as the fundamental limit is the use of the energy from chemical reactions to lift objects to orbit, there won't be substantial change in the costs. Alternatives all appear to require b
Wrong Question (Score:3, Insightful)
The question is, 'is it worth spending x dollars and y effort on boosting an election campaign by messing around with NASA when we could look visionary in other ways'.
I'd say not. They could have made any number of far-fetched plans that don't cost money or show results for a decade -- but they had to pick the one that involves screwing space research _now_
ROI (Score:5, Insightful)
The advocates of purely unmanned space exploration often claim that the same accomplishments that can be done with people can be done with unmanned probes of various varieties. To a point, they are right. Frex, Spirit and Opportunity are doing some of the things that a human being would have done.
However! For as long as Spirit and Opportunity have been working though - something on the order of 80 days - would have taken a person less than a week, if not even a day to do. Additionally, a lot more would have been done. A trained human geologist with a spade, rock hammer, and camera are far, far more flexible than any robotic mission can be for many, many decades.
I suspect that when you look at it from the POV of ROI based on science collected, that the manned-unmanned argument gets even more interesting. Before using the Apollo missions as a strawman, keep in mind that there would be massive differences between the Apollo missions and whatever US, other national or international missions to Mars: almost everyone on the new missions would be a trained scientist and do far, far more scientific work.
Read the ARTICLE! (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't resist pointing out that even your insanely optimistic guess -- that a human can do in a week, or even a day, what it takes Spirit and Opportunity 80 days to do -- means that a human is only 10 to 80 times more productive than a robot.
Now, pay close attention to the difference between $820 million and $900 billion. That's the difference between the (known) cost of two unmanned Mars missions and the (estimated) cost of Bush's manned one. It implies that, to get a better "ROI" from manned flight, your Young Pioneers with their rock hammers and their can-do attitudes will have to be one thousand times more productive than robots, which
I wish you luck.
No. Scratch that. If you were proposing to use your money instead of my tax dollars, I would wish you luck. As it is, I wish you would go back to watching Star Trek.
(I'm really angry about losing the Hubble.)
Closing doors (Score:3, Interesting)
For something that already costed a big percent of sending a man out there, you are very limited on what you can do, how can react, or the creativeness you can develop, are not so much more than a telescope powerful enough (well, maybe with more senses).
Of course, maybe a manned mission that costed too much more, and with a lot of risks, and, even that finally ended sucessfully, did not needed that human intervention, don't happened nothing that needed yes or yes our creativity or ability to react to things that were not thinked months or years ago on earth, but... what if that abilities would made a difference?
Getting There, and Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
A much smaller Shuttle-like orbiter, which can be mated atop a Delta, Titan III or other medium-lift vehicle, is needed. It may look like the Crew Return Vehicle concept that's being rehashed into a shuttle replacement. I think it would have more merit to the old military DynaSoar [astronautix.com] project. Such a vehicle, unlike the Shuttle Orbiters we have, is not a truck...it would be a human taxi, with a small bay for some replacement consumables. For larger payloads and refurbs, use the old Orbiters--unmanned, remote controlled. If we can run robots from millions of miles away, we can surely do the same from low Earth orbit. In fact, the Russians showed it can be done with their own mortibund Shuttle--it's first and only flight was completely unmanned, from launch to landing. [astronautix.com] The old Orbiters would also double as rescue vehicles, along with having additional new Shuttle Taxis ready to go on other pads when a flight is in progress. We can't use single-use rockets for ISS refurbs since the pressurized cargo modules (like the special ones used by Orbiters during an ISS crew and experiment transition) has equipment that must come back. Only our Orbiters have the ability to return large equipment modules safely to Earth.
We should be able to adapt single-use rockets to send new ISS components for assembly. The ISS will need more arms, and a new Orbiter replacement might need something like the current Canadian remote arm.
The main thing I would recommend is (1) just make a reusable human taxi that (1) has an abort mode like the old Apollo spacecraft, where the new Orbiter can rocket away from the booster, as well as (2) a durable crew compartment that, in the case of normal reentry failure, could be separated from the larger body and land by parachute.
Baby steps, please. A Shuttle replacement need not be all things as our current ones tried to be. For LEO, a simple crew vehicle will work. Later, the ISS or a moonbase should be used to create new, true spacecraft that ferry and from the Moon, and can use lunar material to build a Mars vehicle.
When someone says that the cost to go to space is too expensive, I have to emphasize where the money goes to build the spacecraft. It's not like we take millions of dollar bills, smelt them into vehicles or stuff bills in the fuel tanks and set them afire. That money goes to WORKERS who build the space vehicles and COMPANIES that make jobs. That's economically a Good Thing.
Hubble cost seven times too much using shuttle (Score:5, Insightful)
Money to be spent (Score:2, Interesting)
No Manned Space Flight? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, there will never be a time when man does not need to be in space. I do not fault manned space exploration, but I do fault NASA for perpetuating the idea that it has to be expensive. (Mostly due to cost-plus outsourcing.)
We must move into space at some time to avoid total annihilation as the sun dies. The amount of resources available in space (not to mention the fact that we wouldn't have to waste land to get at them) are reason enough to push out there. Robots can't do it (for a lot of reasons), but people can.
If not now, when? If not us, who?
Expencive? off course it is expencive (Score:3, Insightful)
To say that we shouldn't fly men into space because it costs a lot of money is roughtly analog to this:
The first automobiles (better know as 'cars' today) were hidiously expencive and highly unreliable machines. Horses were cheaper, more reliable and even selfreprodusing. By applying the same echonomic logic, people should not have started using cars at all, but keept to the horse... or at least done so until cars could be massmanufacured cheaply (hint: ford would never have started massproducing cars if there wasn't a market - catch 22 anyone?)
Going into space is going to cost a lot. Not going into space might cost us the future.
No point in trying to get off Earth (now) (Score:5, Insightful)
However, there's a huge "but" that follows that last paragraph. Right now, putting huge amounts of resources into some sort of manned spaceflight is ridiculous from a scientific perspective and offers no real lessons on ultimately how we're going to do some sort of sustainable long-distance space flight. What, we can't manage to get Biodome working, and we're supposedly going to have Mars colonies?
Putting on my futurist cap for a moment (much like a dunce cap with the advantage that no-one notices it) I'd have to say that there are three major alternatives for how things will develop overall.
1. We all are wiped out in the shortish term by { global warming, killer viruses, giant asteroid, the covering of all Earth's arable land with AOL disks, etc}. In this situation, manned space flight might add a couple artifacts for the alien archeologists to ponder, but isn't going to matter.
2. We see a continued explosion of new technologies in the areas biotech, advanced physics, computing, etc. In this case, why try manned space flight now? What are we going to learn from pushing 1990s technology to eke out a single, unsustainable dash to Mars and back, when there are so many other interesting problems that can drive science. The money would be better spent elsewhere.
3. We neither wipe ourselves out nor see a explosion of new technology; instead, the rate of change goes down and we converge on a pleasant, fairly quiet future. Moore's law comes to an end, biotech doesn't turn out to produce amazing new developments affordably, modern physics offers no real practical advances in day-to-day life. Perhaps gradual technical progress and the dissemination of technologies to the third world makes Earth a nice, comfortable planet. But ultimately, things in 2200 look pretty recognizable to someone from 1980.
In this case, we'll never manage to achieve the sorts of technologies required to leave the solar system or set up a long-term presence anywhere else. I think this future is to some extent the most interesting because no-one takes it seriously - the assumption of a lot of people is that just because we've seen an incredible explosion of new technologies since the industrial revolution, this explosive growth of knowledge and expertise will continue forever.
That may be true - but I think many people (particularly Slashdot nerds) would benefit from thinking about alternative courses. Maybe we'll have to solve all those human-scale problems (war, enivronmental destruction, poverty, disease, human suffering, etc.) without the benefit of self-replicating autonomous nanotech, real AI, faster-than-light travel, Dyson spheres and all those great science-fictional constructs.
To some extent, I think science fiction provides the secular humanist's equivalent of the Rapture. When asked about an enviromental issue, Reagan's secretary of the interior (James Watts, I believe) reponded that he didn't think the environment is such a big deal because this might the last generation before the Rapture. Listening to futurists, I often get the same kind of feeling that they think that today's issues are about as important as an industrial dispute among buggy whip makers in 1910.
Re:No point in trying to get off Earth (now) (Score:3, Interesting)
4. Bob Hyper Rich Guy is the first human that has personal assests in the multi-trillions.
Bob hates Star Wars, Star Trek and most Science Fiction. Bob loves money and power. Bob starts to feel like God. Bob decides to his proper palance view of Earth should be through a self-sustaining asteriod colony. Bob doesn't waste his money. Bob outsources most of the work to the Russians and Chineese a pays about a 1/2 billion. Bob Hyper Rich Guy's kids own the solar system traffic becaus
Science vs engineering 2 days in a row ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Algorithms vs Software Engineering [slashdot.org]
Engineering will always happen when theory needs to be monetized. Why do we need the state to push for that with taxpayer money - let investors push for space travel thru private ventures - it is after all, a speculative venture.
Seriously people, in the evolution of humanity, it is always fundamental science that is responsible for those huge leaps in progress. All engineering does is verification. eg. You can theorize and "prove" conclusively that space travel is feasible. Actually travelling in space is simply verifying that theorem.
People need a course in hard math, you know, third order differential equations & stuff of that nature, to appreciate that distinction. Most of what makes Computer Science so effective today - - those rigorous algorithms - were invented in the 60s & 70s. But geeks take more pride in Moore's law & chipspeeds & RAM size & so on. That's just engineering, its not that hard ( comparitively speaking ).
If I had a billion dollars to burn, rather than fund a pipedream like putting humans on Mars, I'd spend 900 million on eradicating malaria & smallpox & things like that which kill millions in Africa even today...who can think of space when real people around you are dying ? And I'd use 100 million to fund 10,000 scientists under 25, for research in Fundamental Sciences - math, physics, theoretical CS, that kind of stuff.
Remember - Engineering will always happen when theory needs to be monetized.
Some errors or omissions (Score:4, Informative)
Untrue. Roughly one third of NASAs budget (5 billion of 15 billion) is devoted to manned space flight.
Quote: After the former President Bush announced a similar initiative in 1989, NASA estimated that the cost of sending astronauts to the moon and Mars would be either $471 billion or $541 billion in 1991 dollars, depending on the method of calculation. This is roughly $900 billion in today's dollars. Whatever cost may be estimated by NASA for the new initiative, we can expect cost overruns like those that have often accompanied big NASA programs. (In 1984 NASA estimated that it would cost $8 billion to put the International Space Station in place, not counting the cost of using it. I have seen figures for its cost so far ranging from $25 billion to $60 billion, and the station is far from finished.) Let's not haggle over a hundred billion dollars more or less--I'll estimate that the President's new initiative will cost nearly a trillion dollars.
This old figure has been comprehensively debunked. The 1989 initiative was used as a dream sheet for every blue-sky project in NASA over the next twenty years, with no attempt at reducing costs anywhere and then inflated by 50% anyway. Taking that figure, adjusting for inflation (approx. 1.6 multiplier, giving 750-865 billion), taking the higher figure, rounding it up and then adding 100 billion on top anyway does not seem to be an unbiased type of approach. Another way to put it would be that every blue sky project that NASA had in 1989, less the deliberate 50% addition and extra roundings up, would be 314-361 billion in 1989 dollars; 502-577 billion in todays dollars. For every blue sky project. Over 20 years.Quote:Compare this with the $820 million cost of recently sending the robots Spirit and Opportunity to Mars, roughly one thousandth the cost of the President's initiative.
And roughly one-thousandth the utility of a manned mission (for a summary of the humans versus robots debate please see robots versus humans [eppc.org] Not to mention that the program of Lunar Base plus Manned Mars program will be unlikely to be anywhere near one thousand times the price of Spirit and Opportunity.
Quote: It had been hoped that the shuttle, because reusable, would reduce the cost of putting satellites in orbit. Instead, while it costs about $3,000 a pound to use unmanned rockets to put satellites in orbit, the cost of doing this with the shuttle is about $10,000 a pound. The physicist Robert Park has pointed out that at this rate, even if lead could be turned into gold in orbit, it would not pay to send it up on the shuttle.
Indeed, the shuttle is the least cost effective vehicle for space travel. Unlike, for example, Soyuz. I also agree that manning the launch of payloads that can be unmanned is not at all essential.
(Skimming through, because I have to get back to work)... Quote: After NASA had pushed the Apollo program to the point where people stopped watching lunar landings on television, it canceled Apollo 18 and 19, the missions that were to be specifically devoted to scientific research.
Which implies that no other Apollos were specifically dedicated to scientific research. Apollos 15, 16 and 17 were dedicated to scientific research; when NASA had to cancel two landings originally, it cancelled the original Apollo 15 (which wasn't dedicated to scientific research) and Apollo 20. 18 and 19 were chopped later, after the "J-series" missions (scientific research) were in full swing. No other missions could be cancelled.
Oops, gotta go. Boss is coming ...
Screw the science (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying that the time is ripe to start thinking about building bases on the Moon, or to travel to Mars. I don't know whether that's reasonable at this point in time. What I do know is that it makes absolutely no sense to portray human space travel as some kind of irresponsible folly, and the science as some dignified Cause. They're both human fancies, and as with all fancies, the only question is whether we can afford it or not.
Problem with long-term plans (Score:3, Insightful)
There is absolutely no guarantee that, after scrapping the space-shuttle and the ISS, the current Vision will be fullfilled in a trip to Mars. As Mr. Weinberg sourly, and accurately, points out, the vast majority of the Mars exploration plan will be done after Bush's maximum term as president. There is a difficulty in saying what Bush's motives are regarding the space program. If he wants to scrap space exploration altogether, if he just wants to stop the hemorage that is the space-shuttle and the ISS, or if he really, truly hopes to get to Mars the first step is exactly the same for all three goals--kill the space-shuttle and the ISS.
Politically, the only option that makes any sense is to propose a better vision than the current one. No one wants to be a spoiler, so Bush had to come up with a compelling reason to kill those two programs. "They're just a waste of money" might be true, but if he doesn't have a good replacement for the space program, he's going to look like he doesn't have any Vision.
Regardless, it's a good thing the space-shuttle and ISS are getting phased out. In reality, it may not matter what Bush's Vision is, since he'll be gone before we get to Mars.
That dose of reality aside, here's to hoping that Bush figures out a way to make Americans On Mars as difficult to stop politically as the space-shuttle turned out to be.
Utility was never the point of manned space flight (Score:3, Insightful)
In the same way, human astronauts capture the imagination of people in a way that robots never can and never will. If not for John Kennedy's great vision of putting a man on the moon, we might not have the mighty space program we do today.
Take the humans out of it and the regular people will pay less attention to it, and be more likely to cut the funding altogether. You may not like this fact, but it's how people work.
The wrong analysis (Score:3, Insightful)
What was important is not what they wanted to do, but what they did and 'discovered'. (I have put discovered and explorers in quotes, since many of the explorers where looking for fortunes and how do you discover lands where people already exist, but those are other arguements.)
Why should we go to Mars? For the same reason that we used to climb mountains, because no one has done it before and we have no idea what will be found there or what will come of it. Climbing Mount Everest used to be only for the few, now almost anyone in reasonable health and a good bank account can scale it. The mountain hasn't changed, only our knowledge of how to deal with it.
Our largest problem with space travel is making it safe. The US has become a country without risk takers (except on the freeways), people who are willing to put their life on the line just because. Even those souls that take around the world trips in ballons or wicker boats have armadas of support groups in case something happens.
I say balls to the wall....build something that has a 50-50 chance of making it back and fire it off. If it gets there and back, great. If not, we will probably learn a thousand times as much about what not to do the second time. Regardless, the people on the journey will be heroes and will be written up in countless of school books, especially if they are from several different countries.
Why go there?? Why not...it is the closest thing we have to spreading out species off this planet onto something that is marginally friendly. It will probably cost less to house people on Mars than on the Moon in terms of obtaining resources and creating an safe environment.
Yep
Re:The wrong analysis (Score:3, Insightful)
I am not opposed to us going into space. In fact, I'm strongly in favor of it, although I'm realistic enough to believe that it will take longer than most optimists think. I think the government is going about it in very much the wrong way. Su
Weinberg's inconsistency (Score:3, Insightful)
The truth is, robotic spaceflight IS NO LESS EXPENSIVE than human spaceflight, when you compare apples to apples. Weinberg claims the bulk of NASA's budget goes to human spaceflight, but that is false - roughly half of the space money in the NASA budget over the past couple of decades has gone to robotic missions. Many of which have crashed, gone off course, or otherwise been greatly degraded (Galileo had a tiny fraction of its designed data rate, due to a simple jam in its main antenna). Hubble itself was launched with a fatal flaw that made it close to unusable at first.
The shuttle is obviously a big part of the perceived cost problem for human spaceflight. Reusability sounded like a great goal, but when you're launching 100 tons to orbit and bringing back 75 (or sometimes the whole 100) every time, there's obviously a lot of waste. If you counted orbiter mass along with payload, the shuttle actually gets things to orbit for about $2500/pound...
But if the issue is just getting humans to orbit, we know how to do that as cheaply as robots, too. Soyuz can launch the same number of people for a tenth of the cost of the shuttle. In reality, all those big "requirements" for human spaceflight (air, food, temperature control etc.) are minor add-ons compared to the sophisticated controls an automated robotic system requires. Just look at the DARPA grand challenge for an example of how difficult it is for robots to do things humans can do naturally...
Anyway, enough ranting - Weinberg hasn't done anything original here, he's just echoing other people's arguments, badly.
I'm not sure economics is the applicable standard. (Score:3, Insightful)
How different is this, on a "humanity" scale?
Aren't MOST of you sick at the short-sightedness of the institutions you deal with?:
Government (in the US, anyway) hardly every thinks beyond the next election, unless they are postulating huge costs or huge revenues for political purposes, then they'll make meaningless extrapolations like hell until the number is impressive enough.
Business hardly ever even looks beyond the next YEAR. Most business will happily cannibalize their future for some immediate revenues NOW, much less invest dollars that won't return during the tenure of the current CEO.
I may be a total Pollyanna, but Space Exploration has a (truly) mathematically INFINITE potential.
Granted, the return on investment may be on a term of decades or even centuries, but fer chrissake if even the technophiles are crying about running a balance sheet into the red for spaceflight, well then that bodes a pretty damn dismal future.
Why send humans (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and those rovers have moved, what, a few hundred meters, crawling along (literally) at the speed of a snail? I mean, it took days for Spirit to *turn around and use the other ramp.*
Humans need to be sent because, for the forseeable future, we have immeasurably greater versatility than any robotic probe. A *child* could have either turned Spirit around in seconds, or drove over the parachute and unstuck it from the wheels if anything went wrong. The Apollo astronauts covered more distance in a combined few days on the moon's surface in their buggies than all the probes we've sent to mars can ever hope to.
The point is that, until robots are capable or driving themselves, they will need to be remote-controlled. And the only other body where you could drive a probe remotely at a meaningful speed is the Moon. Mars is taking robotic RC to the limit, crawling along at 16mm per second so that Mission Control can react in time to prevent the probes from crashing into something. Until robots are 100% autonomous and can think for themselves, they need humans there to provide that function for them.
Why should we go to Mars? (Score:3, Insightful)
My most vivid memory from childhoon is the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger. As a fourth grader, I had ditched English class and snuck into a a science class that was watching it live. On the other hand, one of my father's greatest memories is that of his entire small township gathered around the television in the local high school watching Neil Armstrong live on the surface of the moon. I wish I had the opportunity to partake in that feeling, instead of the tragedy which befell Challenger.
I think it is a noble goal to give this generation the same opportunity to experience the joy and pride America felt when Armstrong descended to the moon, and a manned mission to Mars is the means to do just that.
Re:I'll say it first (Score:3, Informative)
Steve Weinberg is a dimwit.
I would have to disagree; and so would the 1979 Nobel commitee, who awarded him the prize for physics. For those who aren't familiar with him, his best-known work has been in unifying the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces. More information can be gleaned from his biography [nobel.se].
Re:I'll say it first (Score:3, Insightful)
On another note,
Re:I'll say it first (Score:5, Informative)
For one thing, the $1 trillion figure cited is an widely acknowledged misquote made (and retracted) by an AP reporter. Ten minutes of fact-checking would have revealed that.
Re:Pooh pooh (Score:2)