25 ms·

For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years

For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. If we remove this year's launch window, you have 10 minimum-energy launch windows in the next 21 years. 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, 2029, 2031, 2033, 2035, 2037, 2039. If we could get the top 5 GDP nations to contribute 1% of their GDP to a proper global space program we'd have 400+ billion dollars a year (NASA has has a budget of around 18 billion lately). We could probably start sending unmanned missions in 2020 with test hardware for in situ resource production, develop a decent vehicle for travelling, then land 3-4 manned missions by 2022 with overlapping areas of operation as Zubrin (and others) have proposed that way if something goes wrong with one you can travel in 1-2 days, without exiting your vehicle, to another one of the missions. You could have extra ships there waiting just to return specimens (and to offer a backup return vehicle for each team to get back up to orbit to return on an ISS-sized ship for the travel to and from Mars, not unlike in The Martian, which you could then park in Orbit around Earth or even the Moon and use as a slightly-used international space station or use it again for another trip out). You could return literal tons of specimens to earth for study, you could have human beings processing the stuff there "no this looks like a waste of time, this one is interesting, that's interesting, that's a weird feature let's drill a few samples here" not to mention just cover more area with various instruments getting all sorts of readings. sigh If only. If we could just get 5 countries to agree to contribute 1% for 2-3 years we could establish a permanent moon base and do a hardcore Mars human-exploration mission. Obviously it would take 10-20 years to pull off but an international committee could be selected (representatives from all 5 nations as well as other nations that say want to help with supporting the missions, wouldn't need to pony up nearly as much money). Call it Starfleet 0.5 and make all of the science that results from the missions 100% public, give every country the UN recognizes a certain allotment of specimens as well for display in government-sponsored museums and to allow their own citizens to study. Alas, I dream too much.

remote_phone 8y ago
I was talking to an oncologist yesterday. Her biggest frustration is that Silicon Valley billionaires are spending billions upon billions to send things to space, when there are serious problems on Earth that could be fought, most importantly cancer. It’s hard to argue with her. $400B/yr would fund a lot of research that would benefit humanity a lot better than a coordinated mission to Mars, even though it would be very exciting to see in my lifetime.
- Latty 8y ago
  To be fair, the commercial space industry isn't focused on stuff like Mars (that's mostly PR stuff) - it's about satellites. GPS, communication, mapping, etc... These are things that make a huge difference to our everyday lives.
- Oi7ie6op 8y ago
  We know that civilization will survive cancer just fine. We do not know the same about asteroid impacts or global warming. So in terms of potential future lives saved space exploration and fighting global warming are worth a lot more than cancer research. After all there has to be someone to get cancer in the first place.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  Money is going into biotech fortunately though. Sam Altman started nudging YC towards biotech a few years ago (one article example https://www.wired.com/2015/11/y-combinator-sam-altman-interview-on-investing-in-biotech-startups/ https://www.wired.com/2015/11/y-combinator-sam-altman-interv... ) and to date has funded the following companies directly involved in cancer research and treatement: Cambridge Cancer Genomics, Oncobox, Mednet, HistoWiz, Luminist, iSono Health, Notable Labs. And I agree, cancer needs figured out (at least the common ones) I lost my father's mother and my father to cancer in my youth and my mother is a survivor of thyroid cancer, I figure I'm a ticking time bomb. Space needs to be a priority though, we're quickly screwing this planet and we're one space-rock or super-volcano away from extinction (both have happened before, both will almost certainly happen again). What I'm more upset about is people spending obscene fortunes on Farmville, World of Warcraft gold, Candy Crush EleventeenNinenty4 Now With Extra Bedazzle, Fortnight etc. Energy, agriculture, medical, space are often neglected in favor of the iPad fruit of the month app of the week. It is extremely frustrating.
  - harperlee 8y ago
    > we're quickly screwing this planet I'd love to see humans achieve interplanetary colonization in my lifespan, but that one is a lame reason: as much as we hurt Earth, it will remain much more habitable than Mars.
wilsonnb2 8y ago
The real question here is why bother spending 1% of our GDP on space exploration? What tangible benefits is it going to bring, and why are those benefits worth more than the benefit that will come from spending 1% of our GDP on something else?
- wastedhours 8y ago
  The real question here is why bother spending 1% of our GDP on anything? It's the same argument as to why we shouldn't invest in infrastructure "don't build those high speed train routes, we'll only see the benefit in 30 years" - space exploration is an investment in the future, and like a lot of investments, the potential payoff is variable but we can never know without trying. If we take a VC analogy (being here on HN and all), then you might as well utilise some of your fund on a literal moonshot - if it fails, you scrub it off, take the learnings (and employ, I suspect, a tonne of people in jobs trying to make it happen). If it wins, you get your outsized outcome to 10x. Sometimes we need state actors to make big bets - like investing in CERN (which has given us the WWW, the LHC, etc...).
  - SiempreViernes 8y ago
    CERN isn't the crazed rush that the moonshot was, it's mostly just stable funding to a certain facility.
    - wastedhours 8y ago
      True - it was probably a stretch to include it alongside the VC analogy, but CERN's also delivering projects with unsure outcomes a la most investments [0]. If they turned the LHC on for example and found precisely nothing of note, it'd have been a failed investment, but was certainly worth the punt. I think one of the issues with space exploration for people is that it just feels so pointless and intangible - its perception so locked into the realms of sci fi that the act of trying feels more of an indulgent nod to starship fantasies and "space race" dick-waving than to realistic scientific progress. [0] money the "whatabout" brigade say should go to cancer research, which too, is also an investment with unsure outcomes (and which usually helpfully ignore things like CERN's impact on cancer research with second order applications of other discoveries...)
Thaxll 8y ago
Or just decrease the insane US defense budget.
- swarnie_ 8y ago
  Can't project global power without 600 billion and god knows how much black budget money. If anything the need to project influence is rising again in a way we haven't seen since the height of the soviet union. despite the rhetoric being thrown at other NATO members right now i fully expect the budget to swell again towards 700-750 over the next two terms
  - rory096 8y ago
    >god knows how much black budget money. Lots of people besides God know. It's 'black' because it's not specifically allocated in unclassified breakdowns. The total amount (per agency) is included in the appropriations bill. [0] $52.6 billion in 2013 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-budget/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-... [1] $81.1 billion requested in 2018 https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/28/trump-administration-requests-811-billion-toward-b/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/28/trump-admin...
Gravityloss 8y ago
Or better robots. Not more expensive ones but more launches and faster progress. One would need to iterate and tolerate some failure.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  The problem is that any launch to Mars is going to be really expensive, even if you adopt the cheapest known means (currently owned by SpaceX). It might be actually cheaper to solve ancillary problems and actually send humans one than say try 20 unmanned missions... With more benefits too.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Or to send more people to the Moon, push the research on in-space manufacturing and bootstrap some semblance of economy in cislunar space. This seems like the most reasonable way to escape the trap of expensive space missions you mention. The trap goes like this: launches are expensive, so let's get more bang for the buck by putting more stuff in a single mission; this makes mission both more expensive (insurance) and preparations take much longer; this decreases the frequency of launches, which increases their costs. Getting some production upwell (fuel, vehicle hulls) would decrease cost of launches, allowing for more frequent and simpler missions, and hopefully break us out of this trap.
  - Gravityloss 8y ago
    The payload cost dwarfs the launch cost. These big missions end up "battlestar galactica" (an actual term used) - a big fail would be a disaster so more money must be spent to really ensure success - meaning it's even bigger - meaning risk must be still lowered. It's a growth spiral leading to stagnation.
larkeith 8y ago
> For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. That's actually much further than I expected - Curiosity has traveled 11 miles in 6 years, it's surprising to me that Opportunity has a faster average pace (not that it's necessarily a hugely useful metric).
- patejam 8y ago
  Curiosity has had wheel problems going back to at least 2014, so I wonder if the slower speed is partly due to that.
mtgx 8y ago
With $400 billion a year we could probably build an orbital ring or some kind of ramp to make all earth-to-space launches much cheaper and greatly advance the space age.
fjabre 8y ago
Excellent summary. Although I think you're far more likely to make Starfleet 0.5 in the private sector. This problem is too big for current governments because they can't ever agree and ideas will be weighed down by infighting/constituents. Good luck getting 5 countries to agree to anything other than not going to war with eachother these days. Compromises on ideas would be too much for such a mission. I think the only way to solve this is private industry i.e. SpaceX IPO. Then you've got plenty of cash, fast moving ideas, economies of scale, and most importantly market incentive -> no better type of incentive.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >SpaceX IPO. I wish they would! I know it likely wouldn't outperform a broadmarket fund but I'd love to own a share or two of Spacex just to feel like I gave a little money towards it. Hell, I wish they'd sell non-functional models of their rockets. I'd buy one just to put on a shelf at home to look at and simultaneously support them with a few bucks of profit.
  - swarnie_ 8y ago
    I'm with you on this one. I know it probably wont outperform the market but i would like to own a piece just for my own enjoyment. On the other side I've been in and out of Telsa multiple times in the last 2 years. I get swept up in the hype, make or lose money then come to my rational senses.
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  > Although I think you're far more likely to make Starfleet 0.5 in the private sector Can you (or anyone) explain this to me? It's not like there's a bunch of briefcases floating around in space with $4B in them...why would there be any private interest in space exploration? Seems like even the private companies are just being fed money from governments anyway, so in the end it's public funding.
  - cobbzilla 8y ago
    two words: asteroid mining. the “resource extraction” industries are salivating at the prospects.
coldtea 8y ago
>A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. Why though? Doesn't seem an inherent limitation of rovers -- just the current rover design.
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
> For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. I completely agree that we should better fund space exploration, but I disagree that humans on Mars are the best way to do that. It would be great to have humans on Mars for many other reasons, but realistically, the human body is pretty poor pound-for-pound and watt-for-watt as a rover, actuator, drill, sensor, or computing substrate. Opportunity didn't cover much ground not because they tried to make a 2800 mile robot but couldn't build one that could do more than 28, but because we have been extremely patient and thorough in exhaustively studying those 28 miles. It's a depth-first, not breadth-first search.
Sol- 8y ago
Or we could just spend those 400+ billion dollars a year on making life on Earth more sustainable so we buy us plenty of time for space exploration and other long-term pursuits without having to engage of the panicked "get off of earth" escapism that plagues much of the space enthusiasts (like Elon Musk). We either stabilize life on Earth or we won't have enough time to make humanity inter-planetary anyway. Space adventures are just so low-priority right now (meanwhile important science can be done with unmanned vehicles).
shireboy 8y ago
I like the direction you're thinking - I've wondered lately if there isn't actually some chance for politicians to get us off of perpetual war-based economies and on to space exploration economies. Maybe naive. One problem I see is the added waste of a global governmental effort. Look at ITER - it sounds nice in theory to have several countries work toward a lofty goal like fusion. But in actuality, each country wants it's own piece so it's built all over the world, assembled in France, is way over budget and the end goal is to do prove the concept by 2025, not build an actual commercial fusion power plant. Similar criticisms are made of ISS. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing if those 5 countries were in a friendly "space race" with their 1% GDP each. Instead of one big program you could run 5 parallel programs that compete. It got us to the moon after all. Obviously there is a place for international cooperation and openness especially in science, but I do wonder if there need to be more base motivations to really get things moving.
influnza 8y ago
Keep dreaming and pass the dreams on. Humanity needs to dream big in order to survive! Our curiosity has led us here and will guide us to the stars.
squirrelicus 8y ago
So if I'm optimistic, we could do this. But why would we?
komali2 8y ago
See I like what you're saying, but try this idea on and see how it fits: What if instead of all that, we just fucken defund education, destroy the environment, and suck as much wealth out of the dregs of society as we can?
Steko 8y ago
> A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. So could a better rover and rovers are getting better quickly. And you could send hundreds of rovers for the cost of a manned mission.
- rory096 8y ago
  Curiosity cost $2.5 billion. The next generation rover, Mars 2020, is based on the same design. Where is this technological leap in rover technology?
  - Steko 8y ago
    > Where is this technological leap Umm Moore's Law? Curiosity was a big leap from Opportunity and Mars 2020, while built on the same platform, has a laundry list of upgrades. Meanwhile, a manned mission is likely to be a trillion dollar project and even if they come in at half a trillion, that's still literally hundreds of $2 billion rovers.
    - mlindner 8y ago
      Where's your data to back up that a manned mission would be a trillion dollars? You can't just throw out random numbers and then use the random numbers you guessed at as a reason to not do something.
itronitron 8y ago
>> (NASA has has a budget of around 18 billion lately) the proposed 12B farm subsidy really puts the NASA budget into perspective
idlewords 8y ago
There's no way to put human beings on Mars without contaminating the planet with Earth bacteria. The bigger the chances there may be life on Mars, or that life once existed there, the more important it becomes to confine exploration to sterilized robots.
handsomechad 8y ago
Why are you using 1% of GDP for your number? 2018 spending will be 4 trillion 2018 GDP is 20 trillion so a thats a 5% increase
lisper 8y ago
> For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. No, you don't. > For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. That's true, but that is because of budgetary constraints, not technical ones. If you put the same amount of money into a rover as it would take to send a human, you could cover a LOT more ground with autonomous rovers. This is self-evidently true because whatever vehicle you use to get a human from A to B you can instead use to move a human-mass (plus life support and consumables) worth of scientific and excavation equipment instead. P.S. I used to work on the Mars Rover program.
- K0SM0S 8y ago
  > I used to work on the Mars Rover program. I just need to thank you for that and hope that you're still somehow involved in making us a more-than-one-planet species. I don't really care whether it's another planet, a space station or whatever else can ensure our survival past this beautiful blue aqua ball. On topic, there is no debate that robotics is the key to exploring space, magnitudes of orders faster and farther than we could in flesh and blood. We could —and probably will— swarm this whole solar system or even close stars with armies of tiny (dare I say nano) drones. A human being is a sniper bullet — one big shot, extremely powerful and focused. A swarm of robots is a fragmentation grenade — small impacts in all directions of space. If you needed to blast/repaint a whole room and only had one shot, which would you use?
  - lisper 8y ago
    I left NASA almost 20 years ago, in no small part because I came to the conclusion that trying to "make us into a more-than-one-planet species" is a fundamentally misguided goal. This is not to say that I do not believe in the value of space exploration. I absolutely do. But I think it's a mistake to try to send our DNA into space. We should be trying to send our ideas into space because they are a lot more robust and flexible than our DNA. I also think that we ought to define our identities by our ideas more than by our DNA. It is merely an accident of history (and a reflection of misguided priorities IMHO) that we developed space-travel technology before we developed AI. But that seems to be in the process of correcting itself. It has been 50 years since we landed on the moon. I predict that in another 50 years the idea that a human can do anything better than a robot in space will be as laughable as the idea that humans can play chess better than computers.
dgzl 8y ago
> If we could get the top 5 GDP nations to contribute 1% of their GDP to a proper global space program we'd have 400+ billion dollars a year You know what's more likely than getting the top 5 GDP nations to donate 1% to a collaborative space program? Obtaining peace on Earth, because that's exactly what you'll need to reach your goal.
i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
Why don't they just put you in charge.
Ntrails 8y ago
> If we could just get 5 countries to agree to contribute 1% for 2-3 years we could establish a permanent moon base and do a hardcore Mars human-exploration mission. Or we could spend that 1% on improving social security, healthcare, reducing poverty/homelessness, clean energy research subsidies etc etc etc. You say 1% as though it's obvious and non impactful. It's a fucking huge amount of money (which you know, because you then go to show what it could do in space exploration space). I'm not even against spending money on it - but you're acting as though it's an obvious best use of money and it definitely isn't

remote_phone 8y ago

I was talking to an oncologist yesterday. Her biggest frustration is that Silicon Valley billionaires are spending billions upon billions to send things to space, when there are serious problems on Earth that could be fought, most importantly cancer. It’s hard to argue with her. $400B/yr would fund a lot of research that would benefit humanity a lot better than a coordinated mission to Mars, even though it would be very exciting to see in my lifetime.

Latty 8y ago
To be fair, the commercial space industry isn't focused on stuff like Mars (that's mostly PR stuff) - it's about satellites. GPS, communication, mapping, etc... These are things that make a huge difference to our everyday lives.
Oi7ie6op 8y ago
We know that civilization will survive cancer just fine. We do not know the same about asteroid impacts or global warming. So in terms of potential future lives saved space exploration and fighting global warming are worth a lot more than cancer research. After all there has to be someone to get cancer in the first place.
ryanmercer 8y ago
Money is going into biotech fortunately though. Sam Altman started nudging YC towards biotech a few years ago (one article example https://www.wired.com/2015/11/y-combinator-sam-altman-interview-on-investing-in-biotech-startups/ https://www.wired.com/2015/11/y-combinator-sam-altman-interv... ) and to date has funded the following companies directly involved in cancer research and treatement: Cambridge Cancer Genomics, Oncobox, Mednet, HistoWiz, Luminist, iSono Health, Notable Labs. And I agree, cancer needs figured out (at least the common ones) I lost my father's mother and my father to cancer in my youth and my mother is a survivor of thyroid cancer, I figure I'm a ticking time bomb. Space needs to be a priority though, we're quickly screwing this planet and we're one space-rock or super-volcano away from extinction (both have happened before, both will almost certainly happen again). What I'm more upset about is people spending obscene fortunes on Farmville, World of Warcraft gold, Candy Crush EleventeenNinenty4 Now With Extra Bedazzle, Fortnight etc. Energy, agriculture, medical, space are often neglected in favor of the iPad fruit of the month app of the week. It is extremely frustrating.
- harperlee 8y ago
  > we're quickly screwing this planet I'd love to see humans achieve interplanetary colonization in my lifespan, but that one is a lame reason: as much as we hurt Earth, it will remain much more habitable than Mars.

wilsonnb2 8y ago

The real question here is why bother spending 1% of our GDP on space exploration? What tangible benefits is it going to bring, and why are those benefits worth more than the benefit that will come from spending 1% of our GDP on something else?

wastedhours 8y ago
The real question here is why bother spending 1% of our GDP on anything? It's the same argument as to why we shouldn't invest in infrastructure "don't build those high speed train routes, we'll only see the benefit in 30 years" - space exploration is an investment in the future, and like a lot of investments, the potential payoff is variable but we can never know without trying. If we take a VC analogy (being here on HN and all), then you might as well utilise some of your fund on a literal moonshot - if it fails, you scrub it off, take the learnings (and employ, I suspect, a tonne of people in jobs trying to make it happen). If it wins, you get your outsized outcome to 10x. Sometimes we need state actors to make big bets - like investing in CERN (which has given us the WWW, the LHC, etc...).
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  CERN isn't the crazed rush that the moonshot was, it's mostly just stable funding to a certain facility.
  - wastedhours 8y ago
    True - it was probably a stretch to include it alongside the VC analogy, but CERN's also delivering projects with unsure outcomes a la most investments [0]. If they turned the LHC on for example and found precisely nothing of note, it'd have been a failed investment, but was certainly worth the punt. I think one of the issues with space exploration for people is that it just feels so pointless and intangible - its perception so locked into the realms of sci fi that the act of trying feels more of an indulgent nod to starship fantasies and "space race" dick-waving than to realistic scientific progress. [0] money the "whatabout" brigade say should go to cancer research, which too, is also an investment with unsure outcomes (and which usually helpfully ignore things like CERN's impact on cancer research with second order applications of other discoveries...)

Thaxll 8y ago

Or just decrease the insane US defense budget.

swarnie_ 8y ago
Can't project global power without 600 billion and god knows how much black budget money. If anything the need to project influence is rising again in a way we haven't seen since the height of the soviet union. despite the rhetoric being thrown at other NATO members right now i fully expect the budget to swell again towards 700-750 over the next two terms
- rory096 8y ago
  >god knows how much black budget money. Lots of people besides God know. It's 'black' because it's not specifically allocated in unclassified breakdowns. The total amount (per agency) is included in the appropriations bill. [0] $52.6 billion in 2013 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-budget/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-... [1] $81.1 billion requested in 2018 https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/28/trump-administration-requests-811-billion-toward-b/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/28/trump-admin...

Gravityloss 8y ago

Or better robots. Not more expensive ones but more launches and faster progress. One would need to iterate and tolerate some failure.

AstralStorm 8y ago
The problem is that any launch to Mars is going to be really expensive, even if you adopt the cheapest known means (currently owned by SpaceX). It might be actually cheaper to solve ancillary problems and actually send humans one than say try 20 unmanned missions... With more benefits too.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Or to send more people to the Moon, push the research on in-space manufacturing and bootstrap some semblance of economy in cislunar space. This seems like the most reasonable way to escape the trap of expensive space missions you mention. The trap goes like this: launches are expensive, so let's get more bang for the buck by putting more stuff in a single mission; this makes mission both more expensive (insurance) and preparations take much longer; this decreases the frequency of launches, which increases their costs. Getting some production upwell (fuel, vehicle hulls) would decrease cost of launches, allowing for more frequent and simpler missions, and hopefully break us out of this trap.
- Gravityloss 8y ago
  The payload cost dwarfs the launch cost. These big missions end up "battlestar galactica" (an actual term used) - a big fail would be a disaster so more money must be spent to really ensure success - meaning it's even bigger - meaning risk must be still lowered. It's a growth spiral leading to stagnation.

larkeith 8y ago

> For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. That's actually much further than I expected - Curiosity has traveled 11 miles in 6 years, it's surprising to me that Opportunity has a faster average pace (not that it's necessarily a hugely useful metric).

patejam 8y ago
Curiosity has had wheel problems going back to at least 2014, so I wonder if the slower speed is partly due to that.

mtgx 8y ago

With $400 billion a year we could probably build an orbital ring or some kind of ramp to make all earth-to-space launches much cheaper and greatly advance the space age.

fjabre 8y ago

Excellent summary. Although I think you're far more likely to make Starfleet 0.5 in the private sector. This problem is too big for current governments because they can't ever agree and ideas will be weighed down by infighting/constituents. Good luck getting 5 countries to agree to anything other than not going to war with eachother these days. Compromises on ideas would be too much for such a mission. I think the only way to solve this is private industry i.e. SpaceX IPO. Then you've got plenty of cash, fast moving ideas, economies of scale, and most importantly market incentive -> no better type of incentive.

ryanmercer 8y ago
>SpaceX IPO. I wish they would! I know it likely wouldn't outperform a broadmarket fund but I'd love to own a share or two of Spacex just to feel like I gave a little money towards it. Hell, I wish they'd sell non-functional models of their rockets. I'd buy one just to put on a shelf at home to look at and simultaneously support them with a few bucks of profit.
- swarnie_ 8y ago
  I'm with you on this one. I know it probably wont outperform the market but i would like to own a piece just for my own enjoyment. On the other side I've been in and out of Telsa multiple times in the last 2 years. I get swept up in the hype, make or lose money then come to my rational senses.
orthecreedence 8y ago
> Although I think you're far more likely to make Starfleet 0.5 in the private sector Can you (or anyone) explain this to me? It's not like there's a bunch of briefcases floating around in space with $4B in them...why would there be any private interest in space exploration? Seems like even the private companies are just being fed money from governments anyway, so in the end it's public funding.
- cobbzilla 8y ago
  two words: asteroid mining. the “resource extraction” industries are salivating at the prospects.

coldtea 8y ago

>A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. Why though? Doesn't seem an inherent limitation of rovers -- just the current rover design.

LeifCarrotson 8y ago

> For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. I completely agree that we should better fund space exploration, but I disagree that humans on Mars are the best way to do that. It would be great to have humans on Mars for many other reasons, but realistically, the human body is pretty poor pound-for-pound and watt-for-watt as a rover, actuator, drill, sensor, or computing substrate. Opportunity didn't cover much ground not because they tried to make a 2800 mile robot but couldn't build one that could do more than 28, but because we have been extremely patient and thorough in exhaustively studying those 28 miles. It's a depth-first, not breadth-first search.

Sol- 8y ago

Or we could just spend those 400+ billion dollars a year on making life on Earth more sustainable so we buy us plenty of time for space exploration and other long-term pursuits without having to engage of the panicked "get off of earth" escapism that plagues much of the space enthusiasts (like Elon Musk). We either stabilize life on Earth or we won't have enough time to make humanity inter-planetary anyway. Space adventures are just so low-priority right now (meanwhile important science can be done with unmanned vehicles).

shireboy 8y ago

I like the direction you're thinking - I've wondered lately if there isn't actually some chance for politicians to get us off of perpetual war-based economies and on to space exploration economies. Maybe naive. One problem I see is the added waste of a global governmental effort. Look at ITER - it sounds nice in theory to have several countries work toward a lofty goal like fusion. But in actuality, each country wants it's own piece so it's built all over the world, assembled in France, is way over budget and the end goal is to do prove the concept by 2025, not build an actual commercial fusion power plant. Similar criticisms are made of ISS. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing if those 5 countries were in a friendly "space race" with their 1% GDP each. Instead of one big program you could run 5 parallel programs that compete. It got us to the moon after all. Obviously there is a place for international cooperation and openness especially in science, but I do wonder if there need to be more base motivations to really get things moving.

influnza 8y ago

Keep dreaming and pass the dreams on. Humanity needs to dream big in order to survive! Our curiosity has led us here and will guide us to the stars.

squirrelicus 8y ago

So if I'm optimistic, we could do this. But why would we?

komali2 8y ago

See I like what you're saying, but try this idea on and see how it fits: What if instead of all that, we just fucken defund education, destroy the environment, and suck as much wealth out of the dregs of society as we can?

Steko 8y ago

> A human can collect more specimens in a day than ALL of the rovers have to date. So could a better rover and rovers are getting better quickly. And you could send hundreds of rovers for the cost of a manned mission.

rory096 8y ago
Curiosity cost $2.5 billion. The next generation rover, Mars 2020, is based on the same design. Where is this technological leap in rover technology?
- Steko 8y ago
  > Where is this technological leap Umm Moore's Law? Curiosity was a big leap from Opportunity and Mars 2020, while built on the same platform, has a laundry list of upgrades. Meanwhile, a manned mission is likely to be a trillion dollar project and even if they come in at half a trillion, that's still literally hundreds of $2 billion rovers.
  - mlindner 8y ago
    Where's your data to back up that a manned mission would be a trillion dollars? You can't just throw out random numbers and then use the random numbers you guessed at as a reason to not do something.

itronitron 8y ago

>> (NASA has has a budget of around 18 billion lately) the proposed 12B farm subsidy really puts the NASA budget into perspective

idlewords 8y ago

There's no way to put human beings on Mars without contaminating the planet with Earth bacteria. The bigger the chances there may be life on Mars, or that life once existed there, the more important it becomes to confine exploration to sterilized robots.

handsomechad 8y ago

Why are you using 1% of GDP for your number? 2018 spending will be 4 trillion 2018 GDP is 20 trillion so a thats a 5% increase

lisper 8y ago

> For any exploratory drilling, or covering any real amount of ground, you need humans. No, you don't. > For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years. That's true, but that is because of budgetary constraints, not technical ones. If you put the same amount of money into a rover as it would take to send a human, you could cover a LOT more ground with autonomous rovers. This is self-evidently true because whatever vehicle you use to get a human from A to B you can instead use to move a human-mass (plus life support and consumables) worth of scientific and excavation equipment instead. P.S. I used to work on the Mars Rover program.

K0SM0S 8y ago
> I used to work on the Mars Rover program. I just need to thank you for that and hope that you're still somehow involved in making us a more-than-one-planet species. I don't really care whether it's another planet, a space station or whatever else can ensure our survival past this beautiful blue aqua ball. On topic, there is no debate that robotics is the key to exploring space, magnitudes of orders faster and farther than we could in flesh and blood. We could —and probably will— swarm this whole solar system or even close stars with armies of tiny (dare I say nano) drones. A human being is a sniper bullet — one big shot, extremely powerful and focused. A swarm of robots is a fragmentation grenade — small impacts in all directions of space. If you needed to blast/repaint a whole room and only had one shot, which would you use?
- lisper 8y ago
  I left NASA almost 20 years ago, in no small part because I came to the conclusion that trying to "make us into a more-than-one-planet species" is a fundamentally misguided goal. This is not to say that I do not believe in the value of space exploration. I absolutely do. But I think it's a mistake to try to send our DNA into space. We should be trying to send our ideas into space because they are a lot more robust and flexible than our DNA. I also think that we ought to define our identities by our ideas more than by our DNA. It is merely an accident of history (and a reflection of misguided priorities IMHO) that we developed space-travel technology before we developed AI. But that seems to be in the process of correcting itself. It has been 50 years since we landed on the moon. I predict that in another 50 years the idea that a human can do anything better than a robot in space will be as laughable as the idea that humans can play chess better than computers.

dgzl 8y ago

> If we could get the top 5 GDP nations to contribute 1% of their GDP to a proper global space program we'd have 400+ billion dollars a year You know what's more likely than getting the top 5 GDP nations to donate 1% to a collaborative space program? Obtaining peace on Earth, because that's exactly what you'll need to reach your goal.

i_made_a_booboo 8y ago

Why don't they just put you in charge.

Ntrails 8y ago

> If we could just get 5 countries to agree to contribute 1% for 2-3 years we could establish a permanent moon base and do a hardcore Mars human-exploration mission. Or we could spend that 1% on improving social security, healthcare, reducing poverty/homelessness, clean energy research subsidies etc etc etc. You say 1% as though it's obvious and non impactful. It's a fucking huge amount of money (which you know, because you then go to show what it could do in space exploration space). I'm not even against spending money on it - but you're acting as though it's an obvious best use of money and it definitely isn't