11 ms·

Why should we send people further than orbit, rather than robots? Robotic missions have been huge successes - you could have teams of people lead many robotic m

Why should we send people further than orbit, rather than robots? Robotic missions have been huge successes - you could have teams of people lead many robotic missions instead of one very limited human visit.

coldtea 7y ago
Because robots are not that flexible / multi-purpose? Except if you mean T-1000 or something... And because they eventually want go to Mars, have a little scientific colony, etc?
- onion2k 7y ago
  Because robots are not that flexible / multi-purpose? Considering the limitations causing a person harm would put on a mission, and the complexity of bringing them back to Earth again, I'd have thought it'd be more flexible to send a bunch of robots.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I think it ultimately all boils down to launch cadence, which seems to be the driving force behind how things are done in space. Launches are rare, which means you want to pack as much value generators into your payload as possible, which now means your payload is an expensive one-off workpiece (vs. a mass-produced item), which means extra risk, which means more safety requirements around integration and launch, which means more expensive launches, which means launching less often, ... So if you're thinking of sending something to Mars for Science, people look attractive (mass produced, can do a lot per dollar spent on getting them qualified for mission), but life support requirements make this too expensive, so sophisticated one-off robots fly from time to time instead. Now if we could increase launch cadence and payload capacity, which is what SpaceX is working on, we could start sending people... or we could load the Starship with multiple cubesat launchers and a payload bay full of remote-operated or semi-automated rovers and drones. In few missions, we could blanket most areas of immediate scientific interest with robots. In this reality, higher payload capacity and launch cadence would drive demand, which means both the scientific robots could be mass-produced, and there would be more iterating on design, increasing the amount of missions that could be done by machines. The way I see it, right now what SpaceX is doing to enable manned missions is pretty much aligned with what's needed to enable proper robotic missions.
_Microft 7y ago
Robotic missions are cool. I'd certainly like to see more of them in inhospitable parts of the solar system! Getting people out of Earth's gravity well and setting up a base somewhere that could grow by itself is super useful though. Imagine it like climbing out of a deep valley onto a plain (it's not literally a plain but the requirements regarding delta-v are so much lower when not going into a well at a planet). There are other valleys (or rather pits) in this plain (i.e. the gas giants, which have gravity wells that we wouldn't get out of again with current technology) but it's a lot easier to do useful stuff 'up there' once you don't have to climb out of Earth's gravity well each and everytime you want to do something out there. Edit: Here's a graphic I just found: https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057669320 https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057669320
- Jaruzel 7y ago
  Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/681/ https://xkcd.com/681/
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    XKCD's are not obligatory. As I wrote before they are the clever person's reaction gif in many cases and only occasionally provide useful content.
    - Jaruzel 7y ago
      The 'obligatory' was tongue-in-cheek to be honest, I should have add the /s suffix.
  - _Microft 7y ago
    That's always a nice one. I had to exclude xkcd to find another graphic of the gravity wells because the use of this graphic is so widespread that it hid all other results.
- twic 7y ago
  A related visualisation is a delta-V map: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of_the_solar_system/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of... AIUI this takes in the cost of both climbing gravity wells, and changing orbital speed and inclination.
CamperBob2 7y ago
Good news is, you don't have to go.
- de_watcher 7y ago
  yet
Razengan 7y ago
Because some of us want the hope of getting the hell out of here one day.
- Lycake 7y ago
  With "getting the hell out of here" do you mean humanity in general or you personally. If you personally: Do you really think public spacetravel will advance that much in our lifetimes? Personally I hope so, but I also doubt it will happen.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    I expect it to advance far enough that I could get off of earth personally. However the competition for free (read government funded positions) will be fierce: I'm more likely to buy the winning lottery ticket 10 times in a row. Multi-billionaires will probably be able to buy a trip.
- jcranberry 7y ago
  In all likelihood, you'd be leaving this nice, hospitable planet with flora and fauna for an oversized dusty rock.
  - Razengan 7y ago
    Nevermind rocks, I would be glad to just even drift in space.
amitparikh 7y ago
Why are human missions so much more costly than robotic missions? Answer: Life Support. If our (very) long-term goal is to stake humanity's claim on other planets/asteroids/etc., then it makes sense to work on improving and expanding Life Support capabilities in harsh environments. I see it as an investment in the future -- it may not seem to have immediate benefits, but these are key milestones and steps for reaching the ultimate goal.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  > If our (very) long-term goal is to stake humanity's claim on other planets/asteroids/etc. This doesn't seem realistic without revolutionary advances in Physics.
  - kadoban 7y ago
    What advances in physics are necessary? I understand it to be an engineering, economics and political question.
    - dikei 7y ago
      Well, if you want to colonized planets in other solar systems, FTL travel or Cryonics technology might be necessary.
      - brohee 7y ago
        People willing to breed and die during the trip would work too. At which point it's a pure engineering challenge, albeit a hard one... Sending humans to outside the solar system doesn't mean they have to be the same humans that departed.
        hobofromabroad 7y ago
        But then the question becomes what generation +1 wants? This is probably going to be nearly as big a problem as the engineering one.
keiferski 7y ago
Robotic missions are multiple orders of magnitude less inspiring or interesting to society as a whole, probably because human beings like to see human beings doing things. For a good example, consider that the Moon Landing was a global, civilization-wide event, whereas even the most famous robotic mission has never been anything more than a popular news item of the week.
- nine_k 7y ago
  > inspiring or interesting That is, less of a... show? What lasting effects of the moon landing(s) are there, to your mind?
  - dotancohen 7y ago
    Yes, less of a show. Ask around at NASA labs how people got into the industry. Among those who were born up until 1970ish, almost every single one will tell you that he was inspired by the moon landings. The trend goes on even outside NASA, when asking people in STEM industries. Furthermore, I would argue - though I have not seen a study on it - that these are the most enthusiastic people, those who love their work.
    - keiferski 7y ago
      If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Pretty apt for space travel, as well. The Moon Landing and Sci-Fi have probably done more for getting people into in science than a million textbooks and outreach programs.
      - andruby 7y ago
        Indeed. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did end up writing the The Little Prince [0], a renown novella about a space faring prince. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince
  - deleted 7y ago
yreg 7y ago
If we want to eventually develop technology to colonize the Solar system then human missions beyond the orbit are early steps on that road map.
martin-adams 7y ago
One reason is that it creates a whole new set of challenges that require innovation to overcome. Those innovations then have secondary benefits that can improve humans down on Earth. Here's a wikipedia page listing NASA spinoff technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
Gravityloss 7y ago
You can first send robot to do slow and simple things, but once you want to do more, humans are much more effective. From Steven Squyres, NASA Mars Rover Principal investigator: > What Spirit and Opportunity typically achieve in a day, a human explorer could do in less than a minute. The Opportunity rover has traversed about 17 km in its five and a half year lifetime; this is less than the distance covered by two astronauts in their Lunar Roving Vehicle in a single EVA on Apollo 17.
- Retric 7y ago
  What an odd metric. The moon cars only averaged 30 km total per mission, meanwhile we can send a hundred rovers for the same price. That’s why people think sending humans for brief trips is pointless. It’s the instruments you’re sending that collect data and sending people means you get vastly less data back, for the same price. Self sustaining colonization is a worthwhile goal. Having people wander around on the surface of the Moon or Mars does not get you there anymore than learning to jump really high can teach you to fly.
  - dotancohen 7y ago
    > it’s the instruments you’re sending that collect data When you know what data you want to collect (temperature, pressure, chemical composition) then I agree that robots are far more efficient. However, humans will measure the things that you didn't know were there. Discovery. There were countless examples from the Lunar missions. Just as an example that comes to mind, we sent no colour cameras to the lunar surface as "there was nothing of colour to photograph". Despite that, I believe on the last lunar landing Schmidt (or Cernan?) noticed that the regolith was actually orange in some places. You could argue that instead of a black and white camera, a colour camera could have been sent. But that is a different instrument package, and just as likely a million other sensor packages could have been sent. That is one human advantage - we have an extremely extensive array of sensors that come with us. In addition to those sensors, humans have processing and reasoning skills, dexterous hands, mobile legs, random-access memory, and are preprogrammed to solve problems, take interest in anomilies, and make connections between seemingly-disparate events.
neals 7y ago
Robots also outperform humans in many other skills, Yet here we are, watching the olympics.
twic 7y ago
You may be interested in "Dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency" [1]: > There is a widely held view in the astronomical community that unmanned robotic space vehicles are, and always will be, more efficient explorers of planetary surfaces than astronauts (e.g. Coates 2001, Clements 2009, Rees 2011). Partly this comes from a common assumption that robotic exploration is cheaper than human exploration (although this isn't necessarily true if like is compared with like) and partly from the expectation that developments in technology will relentlessly increase the capability and reduce the size and cost of robotic missions to the point that human exploration will not be able to compete. I argue below that the experience of human exploration during the Apollo missions, more recent field analogue studies and trends in robotic space exploration all point to exactly the opposite conclusion. [1] https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/53/2/2.22/212515 https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/53/2/2.22/212515
- mannykannot 7y ago
  This looks like a case study in tendentious reasoning - for example "This is because much of the scientific benefit of human missions will consist of samples returned, drill cores drilled and geophysical instruments deployed, all of which were demonstrated by Apollo on the Moon, but none of which have been achieved by the MERs nor will be achieved by the more capable (and vastly more expensive) Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) that is due to land on Mars in 2012." MSL is "vastly more expensive" than what? Not Apollo, and not a human mission to Mars, which are the benchmarks that matter in this context. I am not opposed to manned missions, but the case for their utility is thin, to say the least.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    It is cheaper and easier for a robot to return samples from mars if that is what we want to do. However not by much: either way you now have to carry a rocket and fuel to mars to get back with. It is generally cheaper just carry a full lab and study samples on mars. Where humans excel is on the spot decision making: looking around and saying "that looks interesting, I'm going to ignore the mission plan and go over there instead". That is where great breakthroughs are found, but it is also where mission control gets mad because the important things everyone was interested in don't get studied for something pretty but otherwise uninteresting. We know from earth that there are some interesting geographical features that are only a couple meters wide: such features on mars would not be visible from earth. Thus whatever is on mars needs to recognize interesting things and find it. Humans intuitively recognize interesting things (and do better with just a little training). Teaching computers to recognize such features is a hard, partially unsolved problem. On the moon you can do remote control of robots from earth and get the same level of power from a robot if you want it. (do not read can as we should - there are reasons to not do remote control) You can't do that on mars unless you are working at a speed of meters/day, so whatever is on mars needs to have local control to decide how to get around and what samples to get. Robots generally do best for solved problems. A factory can replace 100 humans with saws with two robots and get more accuracy, but the shapes being cut out of a flat sheet of steel of a standard size. When you only need one part it is often faster to have a human with a saw cut it out (this is less and less true as the design to part chain gets better). The truth is there are advantages to both. At the current state of technology humans can do more than robots. However robots are enough cheaper that we use them anyway: we still don't have the ability to get anything back from mars. Ethically we will not send humans on a one way trip with enough supplies to live on mars for two weeks and then die, so humans are not an option yet.
Tepix 7y ago
SpaceX's goal is to establish an independent human presence beyond Earth to have a life insurance for humanity. Stephen Hawkins agreed: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/05/stephen-hawking-human-extinction-colonize-planet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/05/stephen-hawking-human-extinc...
vidarh 7y ago
Why should we do things instead of watching other people do them on TV? If the purpose is purely functional, then to some extent I'd agree - there are a lot of tasks we can achieve faster and better with robots. But we can't be there via robots in any meaningful way. Even if we manage to some day achieve perfect telepresence, the delay in response will make it continue to feel artificial. And so there will always be at least some people with a drive to actually go there before we even start thinking about things like longevity of the species etc. (another answer might be just because it's there)
ozmbie 7y ago
We should be doing both. Exploration of the solar system could be the greatest human endeavour of the next hundred or thousand years. Both manned and unmanned missions will be needed.
Dumblydorr 7y ago
Robots like Curiosity are very very slow. If we ever want to truly discover life on Mars, humans will likely be the ones to do it as they are just much more productive.
nickik 7y ago
The real problem is that NASA Human Space flight has been a total shitshow while the Robotics has way better managment. This is mostly a historic development of NASA and how politics influnces it. So the problem is not fundamentally with Humans but rather with NASA organisations.
melling 7y ago
I’ve tried to make the case for this a few times on HN. Here are some threads from 2012 and 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750114 - 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314781 - 2012 Put the effort into developing advanced robotics to explore space: “In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe."”
- wnkrshm 7y ago
  Interesting. In my mind as well, it's too early for manned missions - everything we'd do will be similar to Apollo again: Short visits to show we can, then there's no plan to actually turn these achievements into a self-funding endeavour. I applaud what SpaceX does because it extends our capability to do things in space and industrialize it. You need an industrial base to permanently house people. This is mostly just opinion and dreaming but: I don't think we'll have people driving mining rigs on the moon, drinking a beer in their moon bar and missing home. I don't know whether human maintenance can even be a thing because regolith is so vicious to anything operating on the moon - you'd need so many people fixing the robots. That's why the real challenge is coming up with more robust automated systems. I think new approaches to industrial operations can come from this (and maybe even post-scarcity approaches for Earth, if we see it's possible) if we have to plan and realize a remotely operated (or even automated) factory/mining site. Other than on Earth, there are no space constraints, everything is almost the same material, environmental effects on the moon are not a problem (yet). Any industrial site does not have to have the form factor of a terrestial one, it can be the size of ten airports and mostly consist of flat surface, where a few robots are driving around, moving tools and parts and goods. But just as with human spaceflight, we have to find the business case for it.
shadowgovt 7y ago
I'm personally a fan of the "plant a fucking flag on the planet" justification. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/02/space/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/02/space/ Pure science isn't the only reason for NASA's existence. The ultimate goal is always humans further afield than anyone has ever gone before. "boldly expand frontiers in air and space" etc.
electriclove 7y ago
Do both.. but whatever you do, don't hold back any progress on space exploration simply because there might be another option. We need to get stuff done. Yes, increase the number of robotic missions! Yes, send humanity further too!
baq 7y ago
a geologist with a shovel and a lab kit would do more science in a week than all the robots ever sent to mars altogether.
- bluGill 7y ago
  You are not wrong, but not correct either. The geologist will discover more in that week, but the robots have learned things about different parts of the planet that the geologist will never reach.
carapace 7y ago
Rationally, we shouldn't. We want to go, in part because space is so romantic. In reality space exploration is going to be like working in the deepest, most dangerous mine.
aeternum 7y ago
Sending robots is boring. I would much rather support funding for human missions.

coldtea 7y ago

Because robots are not that flexible / multi-purpose? Except if you mean T-1000 or something... And because they eventually want go to Mars, have a little scientific colony, etc?

onion2k 7y ago
Because robots are not that flexible / multi-purpose? Considering the limitations causing a person harm would put on a mission, and the complexity of bringing them back to Earth again, I'd have thought it'd be more flexible to send a bunch of robots.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I think it ultimately all boils down to launch cadence, which seems to be the driving force behind how things are done in space. Launches are rare, which means you want to pack as much value generators into your payload as possible, which now means your payload is an expensive one-off workpiece (vs. a mass-produced item), which means extra risk, which means more safety requirements around integration and launch, which means more expensive launches, which means launching less often, ... So if you're thinking of sending something to Mars for Science, people look attractive (mass produced, can do a lot per dollar spent on getting them qualified for mission), but life support requirements make this too expensive, so sophisticated one-off robots fly from time to time instead. Now if we could increase launch cadence and payload capacity, which is what SpaceX is working on, we could start sending people... or we could load the Starship with multiple cubesat launchers and a payload bay full of remote-operated or semi-automated rovers and drones. In few missions, we could blanket most areas of immediate scientific interest with robots. In this reality, higher payload capacity and launch cadence would drive demand, which means both the scientific robots could be mass-produced, and there would be more iterating on design, increasing the amount of missions that could be done by machines. The way I see it, right now what SpaceX is doing to enable manned missions is pretty much aligned with what's needed to enable proper robotic missions.

_Microft 7y ago

Robotic missions are cool. I'd certainly like to see more of them in inhospitable parts of the solar system! Getting people out of Earth's gravity well and setting up a base somewhere that could grow by itself is super useful though. Imagine it like climbing out of a deep valley onto a plain (it's not literally a plain but the requirements regarding delta-v are so much lower when not going into a well at a planet). There are other valleys (or rather pits) in this plain (i.e. the gas giants, which have gravity wells that we wouldn't get out of again with current technology) but it's a lot easier to do useful stuff 'up there' once you don't have to climb out of Earth's gravity well each and everytime you want to do something out there. Edit: Here's a graphic I just found: https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057669320 https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057669320

Jaruzel 7y ago
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/681/ https://xkcd.com/681/
- jacquesm 7y ago
  XKCD's are not obligatory. As I wrote before they are the clever person's reaction gif in many cases and only occasionally provide useful content.
  - Jaruzel 7y ago
    The 'obligatory' was tongue-in-cheek to be honest, I should have add the /s suffix.
- _Microft 7y ago
  That's always a nice one. I had to exclude xkcd to find another graphic of the gravity wells because the use of this graphic is so widespread that it hid all other results.
twic 7y ago
A related visualisation is a delta-V map: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of_the_solar_system/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of... AIUI this takes in the cost of both climbing gravity wells, and changing orbital speed and inclination.

CamperBob2 7y ago

Good news is, you don't have to go.

de_watcher 7y ago
yet

Razengan 7y ago

Because some of us want the hope of getting the hell out of here one day.

Lycake 7y ago
With "getting the hell out of here" do you mean humanity in general or you personally. If you personally: Do you really think public spacetravel will advance that much in our lifetimes? Personally I hope so, but I also doubt it will happen.
- bluGill 7y ago
  I expect it to advance far enough that I could get off of earth personally. However the competition for free (read government funded positions) will be fierce: I'm more likely to buy the winning lottery ticket 10 times in a row. Multi-billionaires will probably be able to buy a trip.
jcranberry 7y ago
In all likelihood, you'd be leaving this nice, hospitable planet with flora and fauna for an oversized dusty rock.
- Razengan 7y ago
  Nevermind rocks, I would be glad to just even drift in space.

amitparikh 7y ago

Why are human missions so much more costly than robotic missions? Answer: Life Support. If our (very) long-term goal is to stake humanity's claim on other planets/asteroids/etc., then it makes sense to work on improving and expanding Life Support capabilities in harsh environments. I see it as an investment in the future -- it may not seem to have immediate benefits, but these are key milestones and steps for reaching the ultimate goal.

nicoburns 7y ago
> If our (very) long-term goal is to stake humanity's claim on other planets/asteroids/etc. This doesn't seem realistic without revolutionary advances in Physics.
- kadoban 7y ago
  What advances in physics are necessary? I understand it to be an engineering, economics and political question.
  - dikei 7y ago
    Well, if you want to colonized planets in other solar systems, FTL travel or Cryonics technology might be necessary.
    - brohee 7y ago
      People willing to breed and die during the trip would work too. At which point it's a pure engineering challenge, albeit a hard one... Sending humans to outside the solar system doesn't mean they have to be the same humans that departed.
      - hobofromabroad 7y ago
        But then the question becomes what generation +1 wants? This is probably going to be nearly as big a problem as the engineering one.

keiferski 7y ago

Robotic missions are multiple orders of magnitude less inspiring or interesting to society as a whole, probably because human beings like to see human beings doing things. For a good example, consider that the Moon Landing was a global, civilization-wide event, whereas even the most famous robotic mission has never been anything more than a popular news item of the week.

nine_k 7y ago
> inspiring or interesting That is, less of a... show? What lasting effects of the moon landing(s) are there, to your mind?
- dotancohen 7y ago
  Yes, less of a show. Ask around at NASA labs how people got into the industry. Among those who were born up until 1970ish, almost every single one will tell you that he was inspired by the moon landings. The trend goes on even outside NASA, when asking people in STEM industries. Furthermore, I would argue - though I have not seen a study on it - that these are the most enthusiastic people, those who love their work.
  - keiferski 7y ago
    If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Pretty apt for space travel, as well. The Moon Landing and Sci-Fi have probably done more for getting people into in science than a million textbooks and outreach programs.
    - andruby 7y ago
      Indeed. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did end up writing the The Little Prince [0], a renown novella about a space faring prince. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Prince
- deleted 7y ago

yreg 7y ago

If we want to eventually develop technology to colonize the Solar system then human missions beyond the orbit are early steps on that road map.

martin-adams 7y ago

One reason is that it creates a whole new set of challenges that require innovation to overcome. Those innovations then have secondary benefits that can improve humans down on Earth. Here's a wikipedia page listing NASA spinoff technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

Gravityloss 7y ago

You can first send robot to do slow and simple things, but once you want to do more, humans are much more effective. From Steven Squyres, NASA Mars Rover Principal investigator: > What Spirit and Opportunity typically achieve in a day, a human explorer could do in less than a minute. The Opportunity rover has traversed about 17 km in its five and a half year lifetime; this is less than the distance covered by two astronauts in their Lunar Roving Vehicle in a single EVA on Apollo 17.

Retric 7y ago
What an odd metric. The moon cars only averaged 30 km total per mission, meanwhile we can send a hundred rovers for the same price. That’s why people think sending humans for brief trips is pointless. It’s the instruments you’re sending that collect data and sending people means you get vastly less data back, for the same price. Self sustaining colonization is a worthwhile goal. Having people wander around on the surface of the Moon or Mars does not get you there anymore than learning to jump really high can teach you to fly.
- dotancohen 7y ago
  > it’s the instruments you’re sending that collect data When you know what data you want to collect (temperature, pressure, chemical composition) then I agree that robots are far more efficient. However, humans will measure the things that you didn't know were there. Discovery. There were countless examples from the Lunar missions. Just as an example that comes to mind, we sent no colour cameras to the lunar surface as "there was nothing of colour to photograph". Despite that, I believe on the last lunar landing Schmidt (or Cernan?) noticed that the regolith was actually orange in some places. You could argue that instead of a black and white camera, a colour camera could have been sent. But that is a different instrument package, and just as likely a million other sensor packages could have been sent. That is one human advantage - we have an extremely extensive array of sensors that come with us. In addition to those sensors, humans have processing and reasoning skills, dexterous hands, mobile legs, random-access memory, and are preprogrammed to solve problems, take interest in anomilies, and make connections between seemingly-disparate events.

neals 7y ago

Robots also outperform humans in many other skills, Yet here we are, watching the olympics.

twic 7y ago

You may be interested in "Dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency" [1]: > There is a widely held view in the astronomical community that unmanned robotic space vehicles are, and always will be, more efficient explorers of planetary surfaces than astronauts (e.g. Coates 2001, Clements 2009, Rees 2011). Partly this comes from a common assumption that robotic exploration is cheaper than human exploration (although this isn't necessarily true if like is compared with like) and partly from the expectation that developments in technology will relentlessly increase the capability and reduce the size and cost of robotic missions to the point that human exploration will not be able to compete. I argue below that the experience of human exploration during the Apollo missions, more recent field analogue studies and trends in robotic space exploration all point to exactly the opposite conclusion. [1] https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/53/2/2.22/212515 https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/53/2/2.22/212515

mannykannot 7y ago
This looks like a case study in tendentious reasoning - for example "This is because much of the scientific benefit of human missions will consist of samples returned, drill cores drilled and geophysical instruments deployed, all of which were demonstrated by Apollo on the Moon, but none of which have been achieved by the MERs nor will be achieved by the more capable (and vastly more expensive) Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) that is due to land on Mars in 2012." MSL is "vastly more expensive" than what? Not Apollo, and not a human mission to Mars, which are the benchmarks that matter in this context. I am not opposed to manned missions, but the case for their utility is thin, to say the least.
- bluGill 7y ago
  It is cheaper and easier for a robot to return samples from mars if that is what we want to do. However not by much: either way you now have to carry a rocket and fuel to mars to get back with. It is generally cheaper just carry a full lab and study samples on mars. Where humans excel is on the spot decision making: looking around and saying "that looks interesting, I'm going to ignore the mission plan and go over there instead". That is where great breakthroughs are found, but it is also where mission control gets mad because the important things everyone was interested in don't get studied for something pretty but otherwise uninteresting. We know from earth that there are some interesting geographical features that are only a couple meters wide: such features on mars would not be visible from earth. Thus whatever is on mars needs to recognize interesting things and find it. Humans intuitively recognize interesting things (and do better with just a little training). Teaching computers to recognize such features is a hard, partially unsolved problem. On the moon you can do remote control of robots from earth and get the same level of power from a robot if you want it. (do not read can as we should - there are reasons to not do remote control) You can't do that on mars unless you are working at a speed of meters/day, so whatever is on mars needs to have local control to decide how to get around and what samples to get. Robots generally do best for solved problems. A factory can replace 100 humans with saws with two robots and get more accuracy, but the shapes being cut out of a flat sheet of steel of a standard size. When you only need one part it is often faster to have a human with a saw cut it out (this is less and less true as the design to part chain gets better). The truth is there are advantages to both. At the current state of technology humans can do more than robots. However robots are enough cheaper that we use them anyway: we still don't have the ability to get anything back from mars. Ethically we will not send humans on a one way trip with enough supplies to live on mars for two weeks and then die, so humans are not an option yet.

Tepix 7y ago

SpaceX's goal is to establish an independent human presence beyond Earth to have a life insurance for humanity. Stephen Hawkins agreed: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/05/stephen-hawking-human-extinction-colonize-planet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/05/stephen-hawking-human-extinc...

vidarh 7y ago

Why should we do things instead of watching other people do them on TV? If the purpose is purely functional, then to some extent I'd agree - there are a lot of tasks we can achieve faster and better with robots. But we can't be there via robots in any meaningful way. Even if we manage to some day achieve perfect telepresence, the delay in response will make it continue to feel artificial. And so there will always be at least some people with a drive to actually go there before we even start thinking about things like longevity of the species etc. (another answer might be just because it's there)

ozmbie 7y ago

We should be doing both. Exploration of the solar system could be the greatest human endeavour of the next hundred or thousand years. Both manned and unmanned missions will be needed.

Dumblydorr 7y ago

Robots like Curiosity are very very slow. If we ever want to truly discover life on Mars, humans will likely be the ones to do it as they are just much more productive.

nickik 7y ago

The real problem is that NASA Human Space flight has been a total shitshow while the Robotics has way better managment. This is mostly a historic development of NASA and how politics influnces it. So the problem is not fundamentally with Humans but rather with NASA organisations.

melling 7y ago

I’ve tried to make the case for this a few times on HN. Here are some threads from 2012 and 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750114 - 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314781 - 2012 Put the effort into developing advanced robotics to explore space: “In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe."”

wnkrshm 7y ago
Interesting. In my mind as well, it's too early for manned missions - everything we'd do will be similar to Apollo again: Short visits to show we can, then there's no plan to actually turn these achievements into a self-funding endeavour. I applaud what SpaceX does because it extends our capability to do things in space and industrialize it. You need an industrial base to permanently house people. This is mostly just opinion and dreaming but: I don't think we'll have people driving mining rigs on the moon, drinking a beer in their moon bar and missing home. I don't know whether human maintenance can even be a thing because regolith is so vicious to anything operating on the moon - you'd need so many people fixing the robots. That's why the real challenge is coming up with more robust automated systems. I think new approaches to industrial operations can come from this (and maybe even post-scarcity approaches for Earth, if we see it's possible) if we have to plan and realize a remotely operated (or even automated) factory/mining site. Other than on Earth, there are no space constraints, everything is almost the same material, environmental effects on the moon are not a problem (yet). Any industrial site does not have to have the form factor of a terrestial one, it can be the size of ten airports and mostly consist of flat surface, where a few robots are driving around, moving tools and parts and goods. But just as with human spaceflight, we have to find the business case for it.

shadowgovt 7y ago

I'm personally a fan of the "plant a fucking flag on the planet" justification. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/02/space/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/02/space/ Pure science isn't the only reason for NASA's existence. The ultimate goal is always humans further afield than anyone has ever gone before. "boldly expand frontiers in air and space" etc.

electriclove 7y ago

Do both.. but whatever you do, don't hold back any progress on space exploration simply because there might be another option. We need to get stuff done. Yes, increase the number of robotic missions! Yes, send humanity further too!

baq 7y ago

a geologist with a shovel and a lab kit would do more science in a week than all the robots ever sent to mars altogether.

bluGill 7y ago
You are not wrong, but not correct either. The geologist will discover more in that week, but the robots have learned things about different parts of the planet that the geologist will never reach.

carapace 7y ago

Rationally, we shouldn't. We want to go, in part because space is so romantic. In reality space exploration is going to be like working in the deepest, most dangerous mine.

aeternum 7y ago

Sending robots is boring. I would much rather support funding for human missions.