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I hope that it is, because before reaching this comment thread I even thought "I hope it is to fund Blue Origin" We wasted 50 years not going after space like

I hope that it is, because before reaching this comment thread I even thought "I hope it is to fund Blue Origin" We wasted 50 years not going after space like we should have been. Let's get at it.

megous 7y ago
Not sure what you're talking about. There were all kinds of probes sent to other planets/moons and experiments run in the last 50 years in space.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  Research equipment is great and all, I'm not one of those "Why are we wasting money on toys" folks, but there is a real difference between sending a fancy RC car to Mars and enabling us meatbags to get there, with companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX more focused on the latter.
  - davnicwil 7y ago
    Isn't part of the reasoning for doing the former enabling the latter? Isn't it completely essential to do this research before having any chance of sending people to Mars? I don't know the answer by the way, perhaps it was 'pure science' without any pretence of knowledge transferring over, but seems extremely unlikely that's the case - a certain amount of transferable knowledge is guaranteed just in the mechanics of doing it.
  - alpha_squared 7y ago
    Unsure of it's intended or not, but the comment comes off really dismissive of what's been accomplished in the meantime. Studying Mars with "fancy RC car[s]" is vital for both visiting it and long-term study of the planet without unnecessarily risking lives. Our current technology also raises questions about mental health during such long trips. The comment also glosses over the ~70 currently active missions on NASA's plate[0]. NASA also had some major success with good media coverage for other missions to Saturn[1], Jupiter[2][3], and Pluto/Kuiper Belt[4]. Please don't belittle the amazing work that has been accomplished by all the people involved over the decades just because it's not part of pop culture. They've accomplished those things despite having to walk the political tightrope and nearly anemic funding. [0] https://science.nasa.gov/missions-page?field_division_tid=All&field_phase_tid=29 https://science.nasa.gov/missions-page?field_division_tid=Al... [1] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/cassini https://science.nasa.gov/missions/cassini [2] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/galileo https://science.nasa.gov/missions/galileo [3] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/juno https://science.nasa.gov/missions/juno [4] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.ht...
    - pharke 7y ago
      I don't think most people feel negatively about these missions but I do think that a lot of people that are pro space exploration feel that we should be doing these missions as well as human space exploration and that we've really dropped the ball on that second part for the last several decades.
    - mieseratte 7y ago
      > Unsure of it's intended or not, but the comment comes off really dismissive of what's been accomplished in the meantime. I'm not trying to dismiss all the effort that goes into it, but from a, I suppose selfish, perspective it's a lot more important to enable humans to be a spacefaring species than it is to send probes themselves. I guess I'm just too enamored with the Apollo missions and such.
  - SapporoChris 7y ago
    Okay, what is the real difference. Why is sending humans important? Are not robotics many times more efficient money wise than sending a human? Robotics don't need near as much support as humans do, and can be sent one way without much moral quandary. Can you imagine the costs and technology required to send humans out on a voyager mission.
    - megous 7y ago
      Robots/probes can also be sent to more interesting places, or be equipped with sensors to actually "see" something interesting. We'll not send humans to the ground level on Venus, and humans would not see anything other than atmosphere from the orbit, compared to radar mapping of the Venuses surface, for example. I guess the main benefit of sending humans is that exploration/troubleshooting can be more real-time (for the people in the spacecraft).
  - megous 7y ago
    Actually sending people to space seems like much less interesting endeavor to me. We are intelligent, but very limited in our senses and abilities. Where can we really send humans? Moon, Mars maybe, orbit of Mercury/Venus? We also probably want to get them back, so these missions will be complicated by the fact that we don't like to throw away highly trained specialists. What can people do there that is not possible with robots?
criley2 7y ago
>We wasted 50 years not going after space like we should have been. Let's get at it. NASA alone spends some 10X-20X every year what Bezos does, but some how a dinky danky 1 billion is now "going after space like we should have been?" I don't buy it. If NASA's ~22B budget is insufficient, then billionaires making toys for an order of magnitude less is an order of magnitude more insufficient.
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  More new players improves the game. SpaceX has already demonstrated such possibilities.
- rhacker 7y ago
  private/public/accountability makes a diff. look at spacex
  - heyflyguy 7y ago
    That's true and parts/services sourcing by/to multiple vendors improves the marketplace economics in favor of efficiency.
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  Falcon Heavy Flew 3x on a development budget of over 500 million, probably under a billion with dev -> launch time being around 6 years or so. SLS current dev budget is over 7 billion dollars in 8 years, and they haven't finished assembling their first stack.
  - criley2 7y ago
    Falcony Heavy only exists because NASA and the taxpayer have given billions to Tesla to develop it and fly it. To consider SpaceX as anything more than a small government contractor attached firmly to the side of the NASA budget is disingenuous. SpaceX itself is hailed as a NASA success for lowering the cost of launching, and an example of smart government spending.
greesil 7y ago
More time could have been spent reducing launch costs and working on reusability, but the cost of a rocket is not the most expensive part of commercial space systems. In any case, there has been a lot of innovation. Materials, electric propulsion, guidance/nav, instrumentation and sensors, to name a few. That's also 50 years of science and understanding of the solar system. That's knowledge and instrumentation that can keep astronauts from getting killed by a solar flare, since your focus seems to be crewed spaceflight.
- mikeash 7y ago
  Commercial space systems are expensive because the rockets are expensive, though. When you spend a couple hundred million on a launch, everything has to be super lightweight and durable. There’s nothing that says a comsat has to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s just the most cost effective way to use very expensive launches. In a world where reaching orbit is cheap, satellites can be cheap too. If it breaks down, go fix it, or bring it back and put up a new one. If it’s twice as heavy as it could be, but also twice as cheap, that becomes a win. Imagine if all cargo sent from China had to be sent in single-use cargo planes. Everything being sent would be designed around this. Making a cell phone one gram lighter but $10,000 more expensive would be a huge win. All of the cargo would be incredibly valuable. A naive analysis might therefore indicate that sending stuff on reusable ships instead of expendable cargo planes wouldn’t save you much money, since the cargo itself is most of the cost.
sverhagen 7y ago
I'm sure this is not a popular opinion here, but as long as I trip over homeless people, sleeping on the sidewalks, on my stroll to work, it's weird that space exploration would pop up as a "must" instead of a "nice to have".
- AWildC182 7y ago
  They're really orthogonal problems, we could absolutely have our cake and eat it too on this front but we just.....don't. We're this tiny dot in the middle of a massive universe of untapped resources and starting that push could open innumerable opportunities for societal advancement. It doesn't even take much wealth to unlock in the grand scheme of things but we've structured a lot of our society to make it as difficult as possible to solve both problems.
  - cjsawyer 7y ago
    Once we colonize mars, I’d bet that we would have 2 planets with homeless people. I hope I’m wrong though.
    - MPSimmons 7y ago
      Eventually, yeah. But that's kind of touching on the actual problem, isn't it? Homelessness isn't just a lack of houses. It's also a social and psychological problem, and you can't fix just one of those things and hope the problem goes away.
      - AWildC182 7y ago
        It also shows it's not entirely a resource problem... At the end of the day we choose to have homelessness even though we don't need to. Space or no space, it doesn't really make a difference. Ideally space access isn't solely granted through having a trillionaire class to fund it though.
- la_barba 7y ago
  That's a bit like not writing any new code unless you fix every single bug in the existing code. The counter-argument being that newer code will improve the design or fix some architectural issues, or handle upcoming feature requests better, etc and indirectly improve upon the flaws in the existing code. Its not always zero-sum. So, why not do both, and prioritize the money accordingly?

I hope that it is, because before reaching this comment thread I even thought "I hope it is to fund Blue Origin" We wasted 50 years not going after space like we should have been. Let's get at it.

megous 7y ago

Not sure what you're talking about. There were all kinds of probes sent to other planets/moons and experiments run in the last 50 years in space.

mieseratte 7y ago
Research equipment is great and all, I'm not one of those "Why are we wasting money on toys" folks, but there is a real difference between sending a fancy RC car to Mars and enabling us meatbags to get there, with companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX more focused on the latter.
- davnicwil 7y ago
  Isn't part of the reasoning for doing the former enabling the latter? Isn't it completely essential to do this research before having any chance of sending people to Mars? I don't know the answer by the way, perhaps it was 'pure science' without any pretence of knowledge transferring over, but seems extremely unlikely that's the case - a certain amount of transferable knowledge is guaranteed just in the mechanics of doing it.
- alpha_squared 7y ago
  Unsure of it's intended or not, but the comment comes off really dismissive of what's been accomplished in the meantime. Studying Mars with "fancy RC car[s]" is vital for both visiting it and long-term study of the planet without unnecessarily risking lives. Our current technology also raises questions about mental health during such long trips. The comment also glosses over the ~70 currently active missions on NASA's plate[0]. NASA also had some major success with good media coverage for other missions to Saturn[1], Jupiter[2][3], and Pluto/Kuiper Belt[4]. Please don't belittle the amazing work that has been accomplished by all the people involved over the decades just because it's not part of pop culture. They've accomplished those things despite having to walk the political tightrope and nearly anemic funding. [0] https://science.nasa.gov/missions-page?field_division_tid=All&field_phase_tid=29 https://science.nasa.gov/missions-page?field_division_tid=Al... [1] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/cassini https://science.nasa.gov/missions/cassini [2] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/galileo https://science.nasa.gov/missions/galileo [3] https://science.nasa.gov/missions/juno https://science.nasa.gov/missions/juno [4] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.ht...
  - pharke 7y ago
    I don't think most people feel negatively about these missions but I do think that a lot of people that are pro space exploration feel that we should be doing these missions as well as human space exploration and that we've really dropped the ball on that second part for the last several decades.
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    > Unsure of it's intended or not, but the comment comes off really dismissive of what's been accomplished in the meantime. I'm not trying to dismiss all the effort that goes into it, but from a, I suppose selfish, perspective it's a lot more important to enable humans to be a spacefaring species than it is to send probes themselves. I guess I'm just too enamored with the Apollo missions and such.
- SapporoChris 7y ago
  Okay, what is the real difference. Why is sending humans important? Are not robotics many times more efficient money wise than sending a human? Robotics don't need near as much support as humans do, and can be sent one way without much moral quandary. Can you imagine the costs and technology required to send humans out on a voyager mission.
  - megous 7y ago
    Robots/probes can also be sent to more interesting places, or be equipped with sensors to actually "see" something interesting. We'll not send humans to the ground level on Venus, and humans would not see anything other than atmosphere from the orbit, compared to radar mapping of the Venuses surface, for example. I guess the main benefit of sending humans is that exploration/troubleshooting can be more real-time (for the people in the spacecraft).
- megous 7y ago
  Actually sending people to space seems like much less interesting endeavor to me. We are intelligent, but very limited in our senses and abilities. Where can we really send humans? Moon, Mars maybe, orbit of Mercury/Venus? We also probably want to get them back, so these missions will be complicated by the fact that we don't like to throw away highly trained specialists. What can people do there that is not possible with robots?

criley2 7y ago

>We wasted 50 years not going after space like we should have been. Let's get at it. NASA alone spends some 10X-20X every year what Bezos does, but some how a dinky danky 1 billion is now "going after space like we should have been?" I don't buy it. If NASA's ~22B budget is insufficient, then billionaires making toys for an order of magnitude less is an order of magnitude more insufficient.

dwaltrip 7y ago
More new players improves the game. SpaceX has already demonstrated such possibilities.
rhacker 7y ago
private/public/accountability makes a diff. look at spacex
- heyflyguy 7y ago
  That's true and parts/services sourcing by/to multiple vendors improves the marketplace economics in favor of efficiency.
NikolaeVarius 7y ago
Falcon Heavy Flew 3x on a development budget of over 500 million, probably under a billion with dev -> launch time being around 6 years or so. SLS current dev budget is over 7 billion dollars in 8 years, and they haven't finished assembling their first stack.
- criley2 7y ago
  Falcony Heavy only exists because NASA and the taxpayer have given billions to Tesla to develop it and fly it. To consider SpaceX as anything more than a small government contractor attached firmly to the side of the NASA budget is disingenuous. SpaceX itself is hailed as a NASA success for lowering the cost of launching, and an example of smart government spending.

greesil 7y ago

More time could have been spent reducing launch costs and working on reusability, but the cost of a rocket is not the most expensive part of commercial space systems. In any case, there has been a lot of innovation. Materials, electric propulsion, guidance/nav, instrumentation and sensors, to name a few. That's also 50 years of science and understanding of the solar system. That's knowledge and instrumentation that can keep astronauts from getting killed by a solar flare, since your focus seems to be crewed spaceflight.

mikeash 7y ago
Commercial space systems are expensive because the rockets are expensive, though. When you spend a couple hundred million on a launch, everything has to be super lightweight and durable. There’s nothing that says a comsat has to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s just the most cost effective way to use very expensive launches. In a world where reaching orbit is cheap, satellites can be cheap too. If it breaks down, go fix it, or bring it back and put up a new one. If it’s twice as heavy as it could be, but also twice as cheap, that becomes a win. Imagine if all cargo sent from China had to be sent in single-use cargo planes. Everything being sent would be designed around this. Making a cell phone one gram lighter but $10,000 more expensive would be a huge win. All of the cargo would be incredibly valuable. A naive analysis might therefore indicate that sending stuff on reusable ships instead of expendable cargo planes wouldn’t save you much money, since the cargo itself is most of the cost.

sverhagen 7y ago

I'm sure this is not a popular opinion here, but as long as I trip over homeless people, sleeping on the sidewalks, on my stroll to work, it's weird that space exploration would pop up as a "must" instead of a "nice to have".

AWildC182 7y ago
They're really orthogonal problems, we could absolutely have our cake and eat it too on this front but we just.....don't. We're this tiny dot in the middle of a massive universe of untapped resources and starting that push could open innumerable opportunities for societal advancement. It doesn't even take much wealth to unlock in the grand scheme of things but we've structured a lot of our society to make it as difficult as possible to solve both problems.
- cjsawyer 7y ago
  Once we colonize mars, I’d bet that we would have 2 planets with homeless people. I hope I’m wrong though.
  - MPSimmons 7y ago
    Eventually, yeah. But that's kind of touching on the actual problem, isn't it? Homelessness isn't just a lack of houses. It's also a social and psychological problem, and you can't fix just one of those things and hope the problem goes away.
    - AWildC182 7y ago
      It also shows it's not entirely a resource problem... At the end of the day we choose to have homelessness even though we don't need to. Space or no space, it doesn't really make a difference. Ideally space access isn't solely granted through having a trillionaire class to fund it though.
la_barba 7y ago
That's a bit like not writing any new code unless you fix every single bug in the existing code. The counter-argument being that newer code will improve the design or fix some architectural issues, or handle upcoming feature requests better, etc and indirectly improve upon the flaws in the existing code. Its not always zero-sum. So, why not do both, and prioritize the money accordingly?