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Part of article’s argument, can be summarised as “US Congress spends over $10 billion a year on grandiose and unachievable Martian vision-imagine what we could
by skissane 4y ago
Part of article’s argument, can be summarised as “US Congress spends over $10 billion a year on grandiose and unachievable Martian vision-imagine what we could achieve if they gave that to JPL for robotic missions instead”. But that isn’t how Congress works. If they cancelled all expenditure on human space flight, they’d be unlikely to redirect any more than a fraction of that to robotic science missions. Instead, it will probably go to a new weapons system, or Medicare, or farm subsidies, or whatever. Spending it on human spaceflight likely even has indirect benefits for the robotic program-some NASA resources are shared by both programs, and taking away the human spaceflight component of their funding may threaten their overall viability, and hence their ability to serve the robotic programs
- idlewords 4y agoI can give you a concrete counterexample to that. The Perserverance rover is carrying an entire experiment (MOXIE, which makes oxygen from CO2) whose only purpose is to serve a future human mission. NASA is encouraging more of this stuff, and it means automated Mars rovers will go to the boring sites that we need to prep rather than look at the phenomena of highest scientific interest on Mars. That said, I'd love to hear what people who work at JPL and NASA have to say to your point.
- whatshisface 4y agoSample return missions would also be robotic.
- kiratp 4y agohttps://mars.nasa.gov/msr/ https://mars.nasa.gov/msr/ Sample return step 1 (collect samples) is already underway.
- MobiusHorizons 4y agoI think the assertion was that oxygen would be used to fuel the trip back to earth.
- tlb 4y agoOxygen production is also useful for sample return missions. The biggest flaw with the rovers is that they’re terribly slow, so they can only explore a small range around a landing site. If they could cover even 100km/day, which seems plausible on RTG or solar power, we could explore many sites.
- avar 4y agoThe limitation isn't the RTG or solar, it's that a rover moving at that speed would likely get itself stuck in the sand within a day. It happened to Spirit, and it was moving at a glacial pace, with a team of people carefully reviewing its every move.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoUse helos as scouts for the rovers, then. Hmm..wait..
- thatjoeoverthr 4y agoEmpirically, congress has sent nobody to Mars but funds repeated successful probes.
- ceejayoz 4y agoEach of those probes has been justified in part via “this will help get humans to Mars” to earn approval.
- gary_0 4y agoThe article gets the numbers right but the human part absolutely wrong. I'd love it if humans were the kind of creatures that could make big advances by taking them one small boring step at a time with no unachievably ambitious end goal driving them forward, but that's absolutely not how it works. The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold. A lot of computer science grunt-work in decades past was done by or funded by people who thought they could build C-3PO. Reasonable people who avoid likely financial ruin, who don't dream of building impossible machines or visiting other planets, simply don't take the risks needed to make actual technological leaps. Reasonable scientific goals that can't make headlines don't get billions from Congress. We're not capable of building Mars colonies any time soon, that's true, but who knows what we'll invent as we blunder our way in that direction nonetheless?
- Bloodshot997 4y ago[flagged]
- eks391 4y agoLove your perspective. It reminds me of the technological advances from the space race to the moon as well. We aren't taking casual trips up there ever, but the tech that came from it was revolutionary
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y agoi feel like this is all propaganda to convince tax payers to fund this stuff. it's like we never invented anything worthwhile at all if it wasn't used for war or space. maybe we should just try? try spending some money on good for a change and we'll see if good comes out of it.
- moloch-hai 4y agoDisplacing all coal- and oil-generated power with renewables in a short enough time to fend off climate catastrophe would be a good choice.
- fsh 4y agoUsually governments have some kind of plan how much they want to spend on science. A big, but ultimately useless project can kill the funding for a lot of other research.
- inamberclad 4y agoYes, but this is NASA's flagship mission. It's inevitably going to get special treatment from congress.
- fsh 4y agoStill it means that other more useful research will likely not get funded by congress. These big hype projects can do a lot of harm for everyone else.
- ivoras 4y agoYeah, but that's kind of how human progress works. For each Edison or SpaceX which successfuly commercialised a technology, there are Nicola Teslas and Apollo programs which did it way before both the tech and the society were ready for it, in a one-shot way that's a bit difficult to replicate.
- kwhitefoot 4y agoWhat did Tesla do that was so far ahead of time that was difficult to replicate? Surely Tesla, together with Westinghouse, is why we have AC power distribution and polyphase AC motors and neither of those things are difficult once they are properly described. Edison and DC lost that battle.
- salawat 4y agoKeep in mind that some of Tesla's effects are still under U.S. Government lock and key. At the time, whatever it was, it was warranted as being worthy of classification. Another tragic loss to the scientific community as I understand it.
- tmsh 4y ago+1. "...not because it's easy, but because it's hard."
- credit_guy 4y agoIt's silly to do things just because they are hard. Extraordinarily silly. What Kennedy did not say, was "it's just hard enough". Hard enough that we can pull it off, and the Soviets can't, and the world can see that. Much better to gain a space upmanship victory than a shooting nuclear missile victory. Now we are in a different place. Well, maybe not for too long, you never know. China has its own space ambitions, and military ambitions too. But just doing hard things for the sake of doing hard things makes no sense.
- Dudelander 4y agoProbably an unpopular opinion around here, but honestly I think defense, healthcare, and food security to be more practical than human space exploration. I know that major advances in computing were made during the Apollo mission, but that was 60 years ago. What have you done for us lately?
- m4rtink 4y agoMaybe Starlink ? That already showed serious defense implications for example. And while not in-your-face visible I'm sure all the remote sensing sats launched in the last two decades improved our weather forecast, disaster monitoring and agricultural production significantly.
- Dudelander 4y agoYeah, but those aren't related to human space exploration. Not saying we should get rid of the space program 100% - just reduce it's cost by cancelling all the human spaceflight projects.
- anthonypasq 4y agothere are too many existential threats when looking on a long enough timeline to not justify making humanity interplanetary. It just has to happen at some point and i'd like to get moving before i giant asteroid comes hurtling at the planet, or the yellowstone volcano decides to erupt.
- Dudelander 4y agoI see this as an AM/FM problem. If one of these disasters happen, then we should rely on "actual machines" to mitigate or avoid them, and not rely on "F*ing Magic" like interplanetary colonization. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to expand what's possible with "actual machines", but that should be up to academia - and they're pretty clear that human space exploration isn't worth the money.