4 ms·

If we are to leave the planet eventually, some level of skill at keeping people in space is essential. (N.B. I'm a scientist who would love more dedicated robo

by ISL 8y ago

If we are to leave the planet eventually, some level of skill at keeping people in space is essential. (N.B. I'm a scientist who would love more dedicated robotic missions. Human spaceflight is important, too.)

vkou 8y ago
If, instead of sending 12 people to the moon, we took that money, and worked on sending hundreds of robots to the moon... We'd probably have more then zero people on the moon today. And better robots. Or, at least, more than six people in space.
- avmich 8y ago
  > We'd probably have more then zero people on the moon today. Unfortunately the opposite could also be true - loss of interest to space research, because, hey, they don't make anything perceivable... In the awesome game "Bazz Aldrin's Race Into Space" if both (human) players try to perfect the technology, to avoid costly failures with human flights and stop flying for a while, at some point budgets get slashed and the game stops. I suspect it could be a possibility in the real world. Fortunately, by now we both depend on space enough and have enough technology to keep flying.
  - vkou 8y ago
    The benefit of using robots is that failures are less costly, and that you don't have to stop flying if a mission fails.
    - avmich 8y ago
      Robots do have a lot of benefits in space. Lots of them weren't obvious in 1950-s, but robots came a long, long way since then. So apparently did manned spaceflight. Tito, Shuttleworth, Olsen, Ansari, Simonyi, Garriot, Laliberte flights demonstrate it's much more within reach now than before. Same could be said regarding private makers of rockets, spacecrafts and even space stations. Not only we see the push to increase the new industry, with new services to humanity and new taxes to governments - we're actually learning to do things in the environment (the learning itself happens there) which is quite different from where we evolved in. And when we talk about actually living in space - including doing really complex things, like unexpected actions across the specter of what might be needed when you're actually trying to be successful for long periods of time - many robotics specialists, last time I've checked, admit that human flights are actually less costly than robotic ones. In other words, if you want to have a big enough exploration program for space, you ought to include people into that. Fortunately flying to space becomes easier as we learn more.
- garmaine 8y ago
  There are things we learned from Apollo with 1960's technology that the best robots today couldn't tell us. The entire past two decades of rover exploration on Mars could have been accomplished by 1 astronaut in a EVA suit with a rock hammer in a couple of hours. Sometimes you actually need a geologist/biologist/botanist there to determine ground truth, and sometimes people ARE more capable than machines. You need both. Apollo couldn't tell us there was water in the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar poles because they didn't go to the poles, but the Lunar Prospector, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and LCROSS gave us good reason to think so. The orbiters we sent couldn't tell use the age of the Moon or its likely formation process because you actually need a hand-picked diverse set of rock samples for that, and lots of them. It's not an either/or debate, and shouldn't be one. We need to send both humans AND machines. And, at the end of the day, basic science is not why we're going to space. It's about spreading the human race beyond the confines of this rock and establishing a permanent and ever lasting space-faring culture. You CAN'T do that with robots alone.

by ISL 8y ago

vkou 8y ago

If, instead of sending 12 people to the moon, we took that money, and worked on sending hundreds of robots to the moon... We'd probably have more then zero people on the moon today. And better robots. Or, at least, more than six people in space.

avmich 8y ago
> We'd probably have more then zero people on the moon today. Unfortunately the opposite could also be true - loss of interest to space research, because, hey, they don't make anything perceivable... In the awesome game "Bazz Aldrin's Race Into Space" if both (human) players try to perfect the technology, to avoid costly failures with human flights and stop flying for a while, at some point budgets get slashed and the game stops. I suspect it could be a possibility in the real world. Fortunately, by now we both depend on space enough and have enough technology to keep flying.
- vkou 8y ago
  The benefit of using robots is that failures are less costly, and that you don't have to stop flying if a mission fails.
  - avmich 8y ago
    Robots do have a lot of benefits in space. Lots of them weren't obvious in 1950-s, but robots came a long, long way since then. So apparently did manned spaceflight. Tito, Shuttleworth, Olsen, Ansari, Simonyi, Garriot, Laliberte flights demonstrate it's much more within reach now than before. Same could be said regarding private makers of rockets, spacecrafts and even space stations. Not only we see the push to increase the new industry, with new services to humanity and new taxes to governments - we're actually learning to do things in the environment (the learning itself happens there) which is quite different from where we evolved in. And when we talk about actually living in space - including doing really complex things, like unexpected actions across the specter of what might be needed when you're actually trying to be successful for long periods of time - many robotics specialists, last time I've checked, admit that human flights are actually less costly than robotic ones. In other words, if you want to have a big enough exploration program for space, you ought to include people into that. Fortunately flying to space becomes easier as we learn more.
garmaine 8y ago
There are things we learned from Apollo with 1960's technology that the best robots today couldn't tell us. The entire past two decades of rover exploration on Mars could have been accomplished by 1 astronaut in a EVA suit with a rock hammer in a couple of hours. Sometimes you actually need a geologist/biologist/botanist there to determine ground truth, and sometimes people ARE more capable than machines. You need both. Apollo couldn't tell us there was water in the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar poles because they didn't go to the poles, but the Lunar Prospector, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and LCROSS gave us good reason to think so. The orbiters we sent couldn't tell use the age of the Moon or its likely formation process because you actually need a hand-picked diverse set of rock samples for that, and lots of them. It's not an either/or debate, and shouldn't be one. We need to send both humans AND machines. And, at the end of the day, basic science is not why we're going to space. It's about spreading the human race beyond the confines of this rock and establishing a permanent and ever lasting space-faring culture. You CAN'T do that with robots alone.