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Is there a rational defense for NASA's crewed space programs? The robotic missions: satellites, landers, telescopes seem superb, but the crewed missions seem ve

by xnx 1y ago

Is there a rational defense for NASA's crewed space programs? The robotic missions: satellites, landers, telescopes seem superb, but the crewed missions seem very low value. Are crewed missions necessary cover for various black budget programs?

api 1y ago
If you think there's a long term interest in advancing space flight in general, and human space flight in particular, then yes. They directly and indirectly fund a ton of science around that, heavy lift rockets, and also a lot of aviation stuff that is not directly related to space but impacts things like research on more efficient faster air travel. It also gets into aviation medicine, etc. NASA in general is a decent bargain. It's a lot of cutting edge science and engineering expertise for not a lot of money compared to the DoD/DARPA. Cutting it is part of the general national suicide agenda we seem to be in of trying to hollow out all the ways America actually still does lead the world in order to bring back lower value lower margin things America did well in the 1950s.
inetknght 1y ago
I think there's high value in understanding and experiencing zero gravity in a relatively low-risk mission. Forget Mars. I'd love to live in space. Having people in space would solve a lot of Earthly problems (and yes create a whole bunch of new ones). But it'd be cool. Is there a problem with things being cool even if perhaps low-valued by other measures of value?
- aeve890 1y ago
  >Having people in space would solve a lot of Earthly problems Which ones?
  - majkinetor 1y ago
    resources, experimentation with deadly technologies, etc.
  - tough 1y ago
    Like literal unlimited space?
    - lkbm 1y ago
      Global population growth is still measured in the tens of millions. We're a ways off from launching anywhere near a meaningful number of people into space in terms of current terrestrial population.
  - creaturemachine 1y ago
    s/Having/Ejecting
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    Escape proof prisons.
- rocmcd 1y ago
  How is living in space meaningfully different from living in a submersible in the ocean (apart from the view)? You would think we would get really good at the latter before going after the former, and yet I see no interest from people wanting to live in a (shallowly submersed) submarine. It would also be an order of magnitude less expensive and dangerous.
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    Gravity or lack thereof is a big one.
    - rocmcd 1y ago
      Have you seen what happens to people who live in zero gravity for long periods of time? It doesn't sound fun. I do get the appeal of wanting to experience it for a short period of time, though. I would also say that scuba diving is probably the closest you can get to experiencing anything close to zero gravity on Earth.
      - philwelch 1y ago
        Any space colony intended for long term habitation would create artificial gravity through centrifugal force. It's completely doable using materials sourced from the Moon and near-Earth asteroids; there are design studies dating back over fifty years.
      - margalabargala 1y ago
        Sure, living in zero G for a long period of time is not good for you. You asked how space was different from a submersible. I gave you one difference, you expanded on that to a second.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Heck, we can barely build permanent settlements in many places on Earth like Antarctica and deep inside many deserts. And, here we have 1G gravity, 1bar breathable air pressure, a magnetic field and shielding from radiation. We don't have any of that outside of Earth. If we can't build, say, a 10K-person inhabited city on the south pole, how can we even imagine we can build it on the moon or Mars?
Night_Thastus 1y ago
For starters, I think it's a matter of excitement and interest. People still enjoy unmanned missions to a point, but I think for the less technical crowd actually seeing people out there in space doing new things is exciting. I think if you told people cutting NASA would mean no more probes sent to Mars they'd shrug. If you told them it was cancelling a manned mission to Mars and showed them the faces of the people training to do it...they'd care a lot more. It adds a human element people can relate to. Plus, adding people into the equation makes it a lot harder. Harder problems mean more creative solutions are required, which means an opportunity to learn.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Additionally, as wonderful as NASA’s robotic missions are (we should do way more), they don’t move the needle nearly as much in terms of long-term impact on our species as mastering crewed spaceflight (and eventually, indefinite off-world inhabitation) does. The tree of possibilities in a timeline where humans live on the surfaces of other bodies and in permanently spacebourne crafts in significant numbers is infinitely larger than the timeline in which we do not. It’s an endeavor with an extremely long timeline of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. Arguably, the things most worth doing are those with this level of potential impact, with much of what we obsess over in the short term comparatively being embarrassingly myopic bikeshedding. One must avoid leaning too far into this obviously — there are things that truly must be addressed in the short term and cannot be ignored, but the outcome of staring at your feet is just as likely to be catastrophic as staring only at the horizon is. Both can lead you to walk off the edge of a cliff.
  - sorcerer-mar 1y ago
    > but the outcome of staring at your feet is just as likely to be catastrophic as staring only at the horizon is Can you list which risks you believe are mitigated by space travel?
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      The risk is never developing the ability because it never became politically beneficial to do so or never judged to be worth it in the short term and in the worst case scenario losing our chance to do it altogether (there’s nothing guaranteeing that we’ll always have our current ability to escape Earth’s gravity well or even get into orbit). We’ll never get good at things we don’t do and the related technology doesn’t just develop itself. Without intentional efforts to push the space forward, it’ll forever be stuck in limbo.
elictronic 1y ago
SLS is a jobs program. That’s the primary issue with replanting on the moon. Basically congress has set a requirement to build a 2025 operating system using Perl with 100% uptime and spread development across 20 companies run by idiots. NASA doesn’t have any extra budget to spend with that horrible mess.
- echelon 1y ago
  > build a 2025 operating system using Perl with 100% uptime and spread development across 20 companies run by idiots. What!? Can you expand on this? That's horrific. I hope that's just an analogy and not the truth.
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    It's an analogy, yes.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    Well, the SLS is made of Space Shuttle parts and Space Shuttle parts aren't just gold plated... This book has many illustrations of alternate designs considered before the Space Shuttle was finalized https://www.amazon.com/Shuttle-History-Developing-National-Transportation/dp/0963397419 https://www.amazon.com/Shuttle-History-Developing-National-T... as well as the results of late 1980s-early 1990s studies that considered the possibility of putting together Space Shuttle parts in different ways. Say you could have a bigger external tank, four solid rocket boosters instead of two, and a big-ass orbiter which has five engines instead of three. (That one probably is too much of a boondoggle because they'd have to spend a few billion dollars making a bigger launchpad!) You might think that, with the research done to develop the parts, it would be cost effective to build something new from Space Shuttle parts but in those studies it was always outrageously expensive to build anything out of Space Shuttle parts because... Space Shuttle parts are stupendously expensive. In an alternate universe something like the SLS (a non-reusable big-ass booster with lots of stages) could be a lot cheaper than the SLS if it was cost-optimized, but cost-optimization itself isn't cheap! By contrast to that, the Starship model isn't proven either. Reusable Starship to LEO could be a good business, but orbital refueling is still unsolved and even if it is perfected, current plans are to launch 12-20 Starships to land and return maybe 3 tons from the moon. Think of what a huge thing you could build in LEO if you had 20 Starships!
standardUser 1y ago
I think you're combining two issues. Manned spaceflight beyond low earth orbit is about competition with rival nations, including national defense. Manned spaceflight to orbit to conduct experiments - which is the only kind of manned spaceflight happening on a regular basis - has a ton of value. More and more of that will be automated, but we've been doing manned research in space for 60-plus years and the manned spaceflight programs that support that have been and still are indispensable if we want to remain a great power.
- LadyCailin 1y ago
  I don’t think America does. It wants to fuck over trans people, immigrants, and remove the rules for ultra rich people more than anything else, and that comes at a huge cost to America as a whole.
  - exoverito 1y ago
    Hard to argue that trans people are critical to America being a great power. High skill immigration is generally beneficial, but mass illegal migration is far more dubious, as seen in Europe. The OECD just reported that high immigration has actually been negative for Canada, which has had anemic economic growth for the past 10 years. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/high-immigration-is-worsening-canadas-economic-problems-says-report https://nationalpost.com/opinion/high-immigration-is-worseni... I don't think tax cuts for the rich are very wise given the budget deficit, but continuously increasing government spending, taxes and regulation is not wise either. U.S. government spending as a percentage of GDP is the highest it's ever been, even more than during WW2. Over regulation is a major problem, as seen with CAHSR, and even figures on the left are starting to realize it, e.g. Ezra Klein.
    - standardUser 1y ago
      The US has (had) saved itself from the crippling demographic curve that looms over the rest of the Western world thanks to being a nation of immigrants. It also became the research capitol of the world, among countless other benefits gained from welcoming the types of people willing to take risks and go to a foreign land to build a better life. And unlike in Europe, immigrants to the US are overwhelming from similar cultural and religious traditions. It's only the MAGA few who buy into this whole anti-immigrant rhetoric. Even the Republican party still loves immigrants - as any business-oriented party would! - even if they're forced to pretend otherwise due to temporary political concerns.
ModernMech 1y ago
People pay attention when people are sent to space. Also, it manufactures "heroes", which is something every society needs. Just look at the Apollo astronauts, they have been revered for ages and have done a great public service in inspiring future generations. Sending R2D2 to mars doesn't do that.
apical_dendrite 1y ago
The White House budget proposal makes enormous cuts to the things you say are superb. The proposal is a 47% cut to the NASA science budget, cancelling 19 active missions, and a third of the science portfolio.

by xnx 1y ago

api 1y ago

If you think there's a long term interest in advancing space flight in general, and human space flight in particular, then yes. They directly and indirectly fund a ton of science around that, heavy lift rockets, and also a lot of aviation stuff that is not directly related to space but impacts things like research on more efficient faster air travel. It also gets into aviation medicine, etc. NASA in general is a decent bargain. It's a lot of cutting edge science and engineering expertise for not a lot of money compared to the DoD/DARPA. Cutting it is part of the general national suicide agenda we seem to be in of trying to hollow out all the ways America actually still does lead the world in order to bring back lower value lower margin things America did well in the 1950s.

inetknght 1y ago

I think there's high value in understanding and experiencing zero gravity in a relatively low-risk mission. Forget Mars. I'd love to live in space. Having people in space would solve a lot of Earthly problems (and yes create a whole bunch of new ones). But it'd be cool. Is there a problem with things being cool even if perhaps low-valued by other measures of value?

aeve890 1y ago
>Having people in space would solve a lot of Earthly problems Which ones?
- majkinetor 1y ago
  resources, experimentation with deadly technologies, etc.
- tough 1y ago
  Like literal unlimited space?
  - lkbm 1y ago
    Global population growth is still measured in the tens of millions. We're a ways off from launching anywhere near a meaningful number of people into space in terms of current terrestrial population.
- creaturemachine 1y ago
  s/Having/Ejecting
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  Escape proof prisons.
rocmcd 1y ago
How is living in space meaningfully different from living in a submersible in the ocean (apart from the view)? You would think we would get really good at the latter before going after the former, and yet I see no interest from people wanting to live in a (shallowly submersed) submarine. It would also be an order of magnitude less expensive and dangerous.
- margalabargala 1y ago
  Gravity or lack thereof is a big one.
  - rocmcd 1y ago
    Have you seen what happens to people who live in zero gravity for long periods of time? It doesn't sound fun. I do get the appeal of wanting to experience it for a short period of time, though. I would also say that scuba diving is probably the closest you can get to experiencing anything close to zero gravity on Earth.
    - philwelch 1y ago
      Any space colony intended for long term habitation would create artificial gravity through centrifugal force. It's completely doable using materials sourced from the Moon and near-Earth asteroids; there are design studies dating back over fifty years.
    - margalabargala 1y ago
      Sure, living in zero G for a long period of time is not good for you. You asked how space was different from a submersible. I gave you one difference, you expanded on that to a second.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Heck, we can barely build permanent settlements in many places on Earth like Antarctica and deep inside many deserts. And, here we have 1G gravity, 1bar breathable air pressure, a magnetic field and shielding from radiation. We don't have any of that outside of Earth. If we can't build, say, a 10K-person inhabited city on the south pole, how can we even imagine we can build it on the moon or Mars?

Night_Thastus 1y ago

For starters, I think it's a matter of excitement and interest. People still enjoy unmanned missions to a point, but I think for the less technical crowd actually seeing people out there in space doing new things is exciting. I think if you told people cutting NASA would mean no more probes sent to Mars they'd shrug. If you told them it was cancelling a manned mission to Mars and showed them the faces of the people training to do it...they'd care a lot more. It adds a human element people can relate to. Plus, adding people into the equation makes it a lot harder. Harder problems mean more creative solutions are required, which means an opportunity to learn.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Additionally, as wonderful as NASA’s robotic missions are (we should do way more), they don’t move the needle nearly as much in terms of long-term impact on our species as mastering crewed spaceflight (and eventually, indefinite off-world inhabitation) does. The tree of possibilities in a timeline where humans live on the surfaces of other bodies and in permanently spacebourne crafts in significant numbers is infinitely larger than the timeline in which we do not. It’s an endeavor with an extremely long timeline of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. Arguably, the things most worth doing are those with this level of potential impact, with much of what we obsess over in the short term comparatively being embarrassingly myopic bikeshedding. One must avoid leaning too far into this obviously — there are things that truly must be addressed in the short term and cannot be ignored, but the outcome of staring at your feet is just as likely to be catastrophic as staring only at the horizon is. Both can lead you to walk off the edge of a cliff.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  > but the outcome of staring at your feet is just as likely to be catastrophic as staring only at the horizon is Can you list which risks you believe are mitigated by space travel?
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    The risk is never developing the ability because it never became politically beneficial to do so or never judged to be worth it in the short term and in the worst case scenario losing our chance to do it altogether (there’s nothing guaranteeing that we’ll always have our current ability to escape Earth’s gravity well or even get into orbit). We’ll never get good at things we don’t do and the related technology doesn’t just develop itself. Without intentional efforts to push the space forward, it’ll forever be stuck in limbo.

elictronic 1y ago

SLS is a jobs program. That’s the primary issue with replanting on the moon. Basically congress has set a requirement to build a 2025 operating system using Perl with 100% uptime and spread development across 20 companies run by idiots. NASA doesn’t have any extra budget to spend with that horrible mess.

echelon 1y ago
> build a 2025 operating system using Perl with 100% uptime and spread development across 20 companies run by idiots. What!? Can you expand on this? That's horrific. I hope that's just an analogy and not the truth.
- margalabargala 1y ago
  It's an analogy, yes.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Well, the SLS is made of Space Shuttle parts and Space Shuttle parts aren't just gold plated... This book has many illustrations of alternate designs considered before the Space Shuttle was finalized https://www.amazon.com/Shuttle-History-Developing-National-Transportation/dp/0963397419 https://www.amazon.com/Shuttle-History-Developing-National-T... as well as the results of late 1980s-early 1990s studies that considered the possibility of putting together Space Shuttle parts in different ways. Say you could have a bigger external tank, four solid rocket boosters instead of two, and a big-ass orbiter which has five engines instead of three. (That one probably is too much of a boondoggle because they'd have to spend a few billion dollars making a bigger launchpad!) You might think that, with the research done to develop the parts, it would be cost effective to build something new from Space Shuttle parts but in those studies it was always outrageously expensive to build anything out of Space Shuttle parts because... Space Shuttle parts are stupendously expensive. In an alternate universe something like the SLS (a non-reusable big-ass booster with lots of stages) could be a lot cheaper than the SLS if it was cost-optimized, but cost-optimization itself isn't cheap! By contrast to that, the Starship model isn't proven either. Reusable Starship to LEO could be a good business, but orbital refueling is still unsolved and even if it is perfected, current plans are to launch 12-20 Starships to land and return maybe 3 tons from the moon. Think of what a huge thing you could build in LEO if you had 20 Starships!

standardUser 1y ago

I think you're combining two issues. Manned spaceflight beyond low earth orbit is about competition with rival nations, including national defense. Manned spaceflight to orbit to conduct experiments - which is the only kind of manned spaceflight happening on a regular basis - has a ton of value. More and more of that will be automated, but we've been doing manned research in space for 60-plus years and the manned spaceflight programs that support that have been and still are indispensable if we want to remain a great power.

LadyCailin 1y ago
I don’t think America does. It wants to fuck over trans people, immigrants, and remove the rules for ultra rich people more than anything else, and that comes at a huge cost to America as a whole.
- exoverito 1y ago
  Hard to argue that trans people are critical to America being a great power. High skill immigration is generally beneficial, but mass illegal migration is far more dubious, as seen in Europe. The OECD just reported that high immigration has actually been negative for Canada, which has had anemic economic growth for the past 10 years. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/high-immigration-is-worsening-canadas-economic-problems-says-report https://nationalpost.com/opinion/high-immigration-is-worseni... I don't think tax cuts for the rich are very wise given the budget deficit, but continuously increasing government spending, taxes and regulation is not wise either. U.S. government spending as a percentage of GDP is the highest it's ever been, even more than during WW2. Over regulation is a major problem, as seen with CAHSR, and even figures on the left are starting to realize it, e.g. Ezra Klein.
  - standardUser 1y ago
    The US has (had) saved itself from the crippling demographic curve that looms over the rest of the Western world thanks to being a nation of immigrants. It also became the research capitol of the world, among countless other benefits gained from welcoming the types of people willing to take risks and go to a foreign land to build a better life. And unlike in Europe, immigrants to the US are overwhelming from similar cultural and religious traditions. It's only the MAGA few who buy into this whole anti-immigrant rhetoric. Even the Republican party still loves immigrants - as any business-oriented party would! - even if they're forced to pretend otherwise due to temporary political concerns.

ModernMech 1y ago

People pay attention when people are sent to space. Also, it manufactures "heroes", which is something every society needs. Just look at the Apollo astronauts, they have been revered for ages and have done a great public service in inspiring future generations. Sending R2D2 to mars doesn't do that.

apical_dendrite 1y ago

The White House budget proposal makes enormous cuts to the things you say are superb. The proposal is a 47% cut to the NASA science budget, cancelling 19 active missions, and a third of the science portfolio.