12 ms·

I’m not super well informed on this, but is there any reason for sending humans to space at this moment in time (or for the next 20 years for that matter). The

I’m not super well informed on this, but is there any reason for sending humans to space at this moment in time (or for the next 20 years for that matter). The only reason my layperson understanding can think of is mining minerals in space, but I fail to see why robots wouldn’t be able to adequately do the job. In fact wouldn’t sending humans make future space ventures even more costly and put people into unessisary risk?

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> I fail to see why robots wouldn’t be able to adequately do the job. Because they can't adequately do the job, even now, on Earth. Maybe they will, in 20 years. Right now, there are whole classes of missions for which the choice isn't between humans and robots, but between humans and not doing them at all.
- andy_ppp 6y ago
  Even when robots can do this, the defiance of our physical limitations is beyond something we should be able to do. It’s the best of us as a species risking our lives for progress and similarly to something like free solo, even if I’m not capable of doing something so death defying it makes me feel alive to see people who push the boundaries of what’s possible so far.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    That's a fair point. Hell, I'd argue that half the interest in spaceflight (except those of people seeing it all through the lens of an Excel sheet) is because of the idea of sending people up there. That alone makes an occasional manned mission worth it, just to keep the general interest alive.
    - runarberg 6y ago
      It is not the 1910s any more. We don’t risk other peoples lives on exploration. Heroic though it might seem, it is ultimately foolish. We are already exploring the solar system with machines. And there is no reason to risk the explorers life for a more limited and more expensive ways to explore.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        > And there is no reason to risk the explorers life for a more limited and more expensive ways to explore. In places that can be reached by both, it's the machines that are much more limited. Compare e.g. the distanve covered by astronauts on the Moon in a day with the distance covered by Martian rovers in a year. There's a benefit in local decisionmaking instead of a remote one over a very bad link.
      - jacobush 6y ago
        A machine can not tell us how it felt to be there, and write a poem about it.
        noizejoy 6y ago
        but a good sci-fi writer can
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        The sci-fi writer does it in hopes one day a historical fiction author will be able to.
      - scarygliders 6y ago
        Exploration is timeless. "Let's see what's out there!" It's human nature.
        krapp 6y ago
        We already know what's out there, we have telescopes and probes. We're not going to find jungles on Venus or something like that. We're not going to meet the Vulcans.
        cgriswald 6y ago
        > We already know what's out there, we have telescopes and probes. The entire field of astrobiology is a big giant question mark despite our telescopes and probes. If we'd have sent humans to Mars instead of probes, we'd either have proof of past or present life, or we'd have very convincing evidence that it doesn't or never did exist. And we'd have had that relatively quickly. Here, decades later, we know a lot more, but we don't have this one basic fact.
BurningFrog 6y ago
> is there any reason for sending humans to space at this moment in time? Well, tourism, if nothing else! Some people don't see that as a sufficiently serious reason to go. Those people are wrong.
- nickik 6y ago
  Not sure why you got downvotes. You are correct. Tourists drive a whole lot of the economy in many nations and its where many people work. At the moment it might be tourism for rich people, but that's how it has to start.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    I guess people find it vulgar. Space should be for noble missions in the service of all mankind.
    - ric2b 6y ago
      Because the tax payer has paid for nearly all of this and the goal was certainly not for some billionaire couple to get into the hundred mile high club.
      - avmich 6y ago
        Yes, the goal was for everybody to get into the club. Billionaires wold just get there faster, for a fee. Similarly like it happened with aviation. Sergey Korolev was pretty comfortable with the idea.
        ric2b 6y ago
        That's a pipedream, the fuel costs (and pollution) alone make that impossible in any sustainable way.
        runarberg 6y ago
        Aviation gets us from a place where people live to another place where people live. Everyday people are still not going on tourist visits to Antarctica. There is no reason to believe everyday people will go on rockets that takes them to space in any foreseeable future.
sweeneyrod 6y ago
Because we can.
- avmich 6y ago
  And because some of us want.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
losvedir 6y ago
Maybe intercontinental travel? I was watching the launch live stream and at one point, they said, "if they abort in this zone, the crew will land just off the coast of Ireland". That was like 9 minutes after liftoff! So if I understand that correctly, if you go to space, you can travel from Florida to Ireland in ~20 minutes?
- Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
  The thought of a next-gen trillionaire spending the millions of dollars required to launch a freaking rocket just so he can get to Europe in twenty minutes instead of the couple hours a supersonic airliner would take.. man, talk about ostentatious.
  - trhway 6y ago
    There aren't supersonic airliners. Anyway, let's calculate. Starship having passenger capacity about that of Concord, say 100, would burn 1000 ton, $1M, of fuel and oxygen, per a suborbital transcontinental flight. Capital cost say $100M per Starship. Say amortize over 100 flights. So $20K/ticket. Double for operations. $40K/ticket. I don't see any supersonic in near and mid future coming even close. If I remember correctly my middle school physics, ballistic trajectory is the most efficient one :) If anything, DOD is already the first in line for suborbital cargo, not warheads mind you, delivery using Starship.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      That isn’t so far fetched. I pay 5-6k each for several business class trips a year.
      - trhway 6y ago
        that is a tough one, yet lets try to think like an MBA, an exec from RyanAir - with Starship payload to LEO of 100ton+ (and actually we need less than LEO) and pressurized volume of 1000m3, the Boeing 747 would be a close match, so giving the very short flight time we can do a really tight cattle class of like 500 passengers, which brings us into the vicinity of $10K/ticket :) I wonder whether we're reaching the stage where suborbital will start to put out the very long distance passenger air out of business the same way like long distance passenger air put out of business the long distance passenger ships.
bouncycastle 6y ago
Building a moon-base or mars-base would be an interesting experiment for humans. 1. Have a backup of our species in case something happens to Earth. 2. A great experiment in anthropology! It could help us rethink how we organize life on earth. As far as I see, a moonbase would be a "greenfield project" on land that doesn't belong to any nation, where they have to build everything from scratch. How will they organize? Will they need to work or will robots be doing everything for them? Will they be paid & will they have their own money? They will need to reject racism & nationalism to get their goals accomplished, for sure.
- bambataa 6y ago
  Won't they just recreate Earth's social structures on the Moon? Possibly with divergence over time but why would they suddenly abandon racism and nationalism?
  - deadbunny 6y ago
    I would assume/hope the fact there are only a very small number of you living on an inhospitable rock would bond people together in the effort needed to survive.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      They will of course invent a new racism, off-Worlders. But I'll take that as a slight improvement to our current situation anyways.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Look no further than to The Expanse, welwala[0]. It's all fun and games until (spoiler alert) someone decides to drop some space rocks on your home. That said, I think it's still worth the risk. -- [0] - A slur that roughly translates to "lover of planets and culture that comes from them".
        6y ago
EamonnMR 6y ago
Escaping planet Earth is a reasonable goal.
- runarberg 6y ago
  That goal was reach in the middle of the last century. EDIT: And so far this goal has been a dead end.. Voyager 1 has proven it self to be a better explorer then Buzz Aldrin or Yuri Gagarin.
pvarangot 6y ago
For research? If you are thinking for example about microfabbing in space designing an autonomous experiment would be very hard. A lot of cool things could be done with for example adaptive optics if we could manufacture optical elements in space. The technology to align them in orbit is already there. And since it's so expensive to go now a lot of cool ideas like that can't be tried out.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> I fail to see why robots wouldn’t be able to adequately do the job. Because they can't adequately do the job, even now, on Earth. Maybe they will, in 20 years. Right now, there are whole classes of missions for which the choice isn't between humans and robots, but between humans and not doing them at all.

andy_ppp 6y ago
Even when robots can do this, the defiance of our physical limitations is beyond something we should be able to do. It’s the best of us as a species risking our lives for progress and similarly to something like free solo, even if I’m not capable of doing something so death defying it makes me feel alive to see people who push the boundaries of what’s possible so far.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  That's a fair point. Hell, I'd argue that half the interest in spaceflight (except those of people seeing it all through the lens of an Excel sheet) is because of the idea of sending people up there. That alone makes an occasional manned mission worth it, just to keep the general interest alive.
  - runarberg 6y ago
    It is not the 1910s any more. We don’t risk other peoples lives on exploration. Heroic though it might seem, it is ultimately foolish. We are already exploring the solar system with machines. And there is no reason to risk the explorers life for a more limited and more expensive ways to explore.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > And there is no reason to risk the explorers life for a more limited and more expensive ways to explore. In places that can be reached by both, it's the machines that are much more limited. Compare e.g. the distanve covered by astronauts on the Moon in a day with the distance covered by Martian rovers in a year. There's a benefit in local decisionmaking instead of a remote one over a very bad link.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      A machine can not tell us how it felt to be there, and write a poem about it.
      - noizejoy 6y ago
        but a good sci-fi writer can
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        The sci-fi writer does it in hopes one day a historical fiction author will be able to.
    - scarygliders 6y ago
      Exploration is timeless. "Let's see what's out there!" It's human nature.
      - krapp 6y ago
        We already know what's out there, we have telescopes and probes. We're not going to find jungles on Venus or something like that. We're not going to meet the Vulcans.
        cgriswald 6y ago
        > We already know what's out there, we have telescopes and probes. The entire field of astrobiology is a big giant question mark despite our telescopes and probes. If we'd have sent humans to Mars instead of probes, we'd either have proof of past or present life, or we'd have very convincing evidence that it doesn't or never did exist. And we'd have had that relatively quickly. Here, decades later, we know a lot more, but we don't have this one basic fact.

BurningFrog 6y ago

> is there any reason for sending humans to space at this moment in time? Well, tourism, if nothing else! Some people don't see that as a sufficiently serious reason to go. Those people are wrong.

nickik 6y ago
Not sure why you got downvotes. You are correct. Tourists drive a whole lot of the economy in many nations and its where many people work. At the moment it might be tourism for rich people, but that's how it has to start.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  I guess people find it vulgar. Space should be for noble missions in the service of all mankind.
  - ric2b 6y ago
    Because the tax payer has paid for nearly all of this and the goal was certainly not for some billionaire couple to get into the hundred mile high club.
    - avmich 6y ago
      Yes, the goal was for everybody to get into the club. Billionaires wold just get there faster, for a fee. Similarly like it happened with aviation. Sergey Korolev was pretty comfortable with the idea.
      - ric2b 6y ago
        That's a pipedream, the fuel costs (and pollution) alone make that impossible in any sustainable way.
      - runarberg 6y ago
        Aviation gets us from a place where people live to another place where people live. Everyday people are still not going on tourist visits to Antarctica. There is no reason to believe everyday people will go on rockets that takes them to space in any foreseeable future.

sweeneyrod 6y ago

Because we can.

avmich 6y ago
And because some of us want.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

losvedir 6y ago

Maybe intercontinental travel? I was watching the launch live stream and at one point, they said, "if they abort in this zone, the crew will land just off the coast of Ireland". That was like 9 minutes after liftoff! So if I understand that correctly, if you go to space, you can travel from Florida to Ireland in ~20 minutes?

Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
The thought of a next-gen trillionaire spending the millions of dollars required to launch a freaking rocket just so he can get to Europe in twenty minutes instead of the couple hours a supersonic airliner would take.. man, talk about ostentatious.
- trhway 6y ago
  There aren't supersonic airliners. Anyway, let's calculate. Starship having passenger capacity about that of Concord, say 100, would burn 1000 ton, $1M, of fuel and oxygen, per a suborbital transcontinental flight. Capital cost say $100M per Starship. Say amortize over 100 flights. So $20K/ticket. Double for operations. $40K/ticket. I don't see any supersonic in near and mid future coming even close. If I remember correctly my middle school physics, ballistic trajectory is the most efficient one :) If anything, DOD is already the first in line for suborbital cargo, not warheads mind you, delivery using Starship.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    That isn’t so far fetched. I pay 5-6k each for several business class trips a year.
    - trhway 6y ago
      that is a tough one, yet lets try to think like an MBA, an exec from RyanAir - with Starship payload to LEO of 100ton+ (and actually we need less than LEO) and pressurized volume of 1000m3, the Boeing 747 would be a close match, so giving the very short flight time we can do a really tight cattle class of like 500 passengers, which brings us into the vicinity of $10K/ticket :) I wonder whether we're reaching the stage where suborbital will start to put out the very long distance passenger air out of business the same way like long distance passenger air put out of business the long distance passenger ships.

bouncycastle 6y ago

Building a moon-base or mars-base would be an interesting experiment for humans. 1. Have a backup of our species in case something happens to Earth. 2. A great experiment in anthropology! It could help us rethink how we organize life on earth. As far as I see, a moonbase would be a "greenfield project" on land that doesn't belong to any nation, where they have to build everything from scratch. How will they organize? Will they need to work or will robots be doing everything for them? Will they be paid & will they have their own money? They will need to reject racism & nationalism to get their goals accomplished, for sure.

bambataa 6y ago
Won't they just recreate Earth's social structures on the Moon? Possibly with divergence over time but why would they suddenly abandon racism and nationalism?
- deadbunny 6y ago
  I would assume/hope the fact there are only a very small number of you living on an inhospitable rock would bond people together in the effort needed to survive.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    They will of course invent a new racism, off-Worlders. But I'll take that as a slight improvement to our current situation anyways.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Look no further than to The Expanse, welwala[0]. It's all fun and games until (spoiler alert) someone decides to drop some space rocks on your home. That said, I think it's still worth the risk. -- [0] - A slur that roughly translates to "lover of planets and culture that comes from them".
      - 6y ago

EamonnMR 6y ago

Escaping planet Earth is a reasonable goal.

runarberg 6y ago
That goal was reach in the middle of the last century. EDIT: And so far this goal has been a dead end.. Voyager 1 has proven it self to be a better explorer then Buzz Aldrin or Yuri Gagarin.

pvarangot 6y ago

For research? If you are thinking for example about microfabbing in space designing an autonomous experiment would be very hard. A lot of cool things could be done with for example adaptive optics if we could manufacture optical elements in space. The technology to align them in orbit is already there. And since it's so expensive to go now a lot of cool ideas like that can't be tried out.