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These are all very practical arguments, but spaceflight is not a practical endeavor. It is fundamentally an emotional activity. The will to do science originat

These are all very practical arguments, but spaceflight is not a practical endeavor. It is fundamentally an emotional activity. The will to do science originates in the urge to explore. Whether we're spending the money to send people or robots, it's not a rational pursuit. We explore because we want to. Why do we want to? No one knows for sure. Human spaceflight is valuable because things are emotionally different when a human is doing them. That's why spaceflight is so much more expensive when humans are aboard: because we have higher standards for humans, despite the obvious evidence that human life is abundant and cheap. The value of a human to another human is primarily an emotional calculation, not economic. Even when the mission remote asset is a robot, we focus on the human element. Coverage of robot missions always includes a lot of people cheering at the launch, reactions in the control room, interviews with project leads, etc. So, I would not be so quick to dismiss human spaceflight based on metrics of efficiency. The whole thing of exploring space is inefficient, and serves no practical purpose. Spaceflight runs on inspiration, and that's something we haven't figured out how to automate (and IMO never will).

shawnz 8y ago
One important reason to research space travel is to protect our species from disasters that would destroy the Earth. I'd bet our instinctual desire to explore probably evolved for a similar purpose.
cannonedhamster 8y ago
As others have already mentioned, spaceflight has useful applications at creating a long term stable population center outside of Earth. There's also the commercial application of being able to gather vast resources relatively cheaply from the asteroid belts once there's a platform to routinely and cheaply transfer cargo up to space, down is relatively easy. We're going to run out of raw resources at some point and this will be the least costly application. Deep well drilling could access large amounts of trapped resources however the cost is prohibitive for the return.
bdamm 8y ago
Communication, weapons, navigation, and weather forecasting are the modern cornerstones of spaceflight. I bet communication satellites outnumber all others by 10 to 1. I love the emotional aspect of space exploration but I wanted to note that there are established, profitable, and increasingly essential reasons for mastering spaceflight.

shawnz 8y ago

One important reason to research space travel is to protect our species from disasters that would destroy the Earth. I'd bet our instinctual desire to explore probably evolved for a similar purpose.

cannonedhamster 8y ago

As others have already mentioned, spaceflight has useful applications at creating a long term stable population center outside of Earth. There's also the commercial application of being able to gather vast resources relatively cheaply from the asteroid belts once there's a platform to routinely and cheaply transfer cargo up to space, down is relatively easy. We're going to run out of raw resources at some point and this will be the least costly application. Deep well drilling could access large amounts of trapped resources however the cost is prohibitive for the return.

bdamm 8y ago

Communication, weapons, navigation, and weather forecasting are the modern cornerstones of spaceflight. I bet communication satellites outnumber all others by 10 to 1. I love the emotional aspect of space exploration but I wanted to note that there are established, profitable, and increasingly essential reasons for mastering spaceflight.