8 ms·

To make manned space flight seem so undesirable is disingenuous to the breathtaking reality of the first manned moon landing. It disheartens me to see that the

by Flankk 17y ago

To make manned space flight seem so undesirable is disingenuous to the breathtaking reality of the first manned moon landing. It disheartens me to see that the accomplishment that once inspired a nation is widely and apathetically looked upon as a waste of resources. Stephen Hawking puts it better than I do: Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don't catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don't spread the human race into space, which I'm arguing should be our long-term strategy. If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before.

borism 17y ago
Manned missions don't catch people's imagination anymore either. "Space-optimism" of 60-70s is long gone. Now is the time to do real work in outer space.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  It depends. We can't say for sure manned spaceflight doesn't catch people's imagination because since the early 70's we really don't send people anywhere interesting. Er can't blame people: the ISS is as exciting as camping on your backyard. It may solve some problems and help develop some technologies important for future space travelers, but it's difficult to call it space exploration when you don't explore anything. The state of science education also doesn't help either. Most people cannot appreciate how devilishly hard is to keep a presence in LEO. As for keeping a presence on the Moon, it is important because we have to perfect a lot of protocols before we can pretend to be ready for a trip to Mars and, if anything goes wrong, rescue is a week away. Even if you have to process a couple tons of rocks to get a liter of water, it would be cheaper than to send it from Earth and by landing a couple automated water factories before any humans venture there could also reduce the risks (and costs) further as they wouldn't have to carry a lot of water.
  - borism 17y ago
    But that's why we shouldn't do manned missions first!
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      You can't perfect the manned spaceflight protocols with unmanned probes. The Moon is a stepping stone towards Mars and, if we can mine lunar regolith for metals, water and propellant (LOX, LH2), we are golden: the lunar base can become the best spot for building and launching spacecraft. I wonder if there is carbon and nitrogen there too. That would make colonization much simpler.
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  That's because they don't do anything groundbreaking. Not to run down the hard work of astronauts and mission planners - I am very cognizant of the effort and achievement that goes into things like maintaining the Hubble telescope for so long. The Space Shuttle was cool, tremendously cool - we built a reusable spacecraft. That blew my mind in the 1980s. So did the idea of a space station, and indeed the ISS is also fairly cool - although people would be a lot impressed if it was bigger and had rotational gravity. The reason the space-optimism is gone is twofold: 1) it is hard to do stuff in space, and it's true there's not so much we could usefully do on the moon, that would have immediate, obvious short term benefits; but 2) it's been >30 years since we [qua humanity] went to the moon and even though we've done all sort of insane technical stuff with lasers, computers, and what-not, it seems - especially to the casual onlooker - that we can't think of a single interesting thing to do on the Moon now that we couldn't have done 30 years ago. 1) is an issue, for sure (although I feel limited by my own lack of scientific knowledge in considering the possible benefits). But 2) just pisses me off. We can't think of anything cool and somewhat affordable that we could do on the moon? Really? Even with robots? Moon TV NOW godammit!
- donaq 17y ago
  You know what would really capture people's imaginations? Space piracy. With frikkin' laser beams. Once there are bad guys in space stealing our shit, you can be sure the public will rally around the idea of sending good guys into space.
nazgulnarsil 17y ago
sending people into space right now is grandstanding. the resources that go into it would be better spent preparing for true permanent habitation of other planets.
- patio11 17y ago
  If you want to invest a lot of money in making a place livable for humans, might I suggest Detroit or Africa? I'm not even kidding. If we're going to spend a few billion, lets save some lives with it, rather than produce extraordinarily expensive screensavers for geeks.
  - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
    feed starving man. starving man survives to father 2 children in a region that obviously could not even support him. we've just doubled suffering in our system. when you pour money into a country and you see no increase in the standard of living because 1: the aid is siphoned off by corruption and used for further violence 2: the population increases up to the new maximal carrying capacity should you really continue aid? see also: dead aid http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254067031&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374...
    - btilly 17y ago
      This argument was originally due to Malthus, and was used by the English to justify not helping the Irish during the Irish Potato Famine. Shortly thereafter improvements in agriculture made it clear that Europe could sustain much, much larger populations. The specter of mass famine from population growth was popular in the 60s. Predictions then focused on India. But improvements in agriculture resulted in calories/capita improving 23% from 1960 to 2000 despite a doubling in population. Given historical precedent and ongoing improvements in agriculture (many of which have not taken hold in Africa yet), is it morally sound to repeat the failed argument today? Besides which, the biggest cause of famine today is political strife, not carrying capacity. To pick a random example, Ethiopia was a net exporter of food during the famous famines there in the 1980s. The famines occurred in a region called Eritrea that was undergoing a civil war, and were supported by the government as a way of weakening the resistance. And finally around the world we are finding that population growth is faster among poor people than rich. So helping people attain a decent standard of living seems to be a more effective method of population control than encouraging them to starve themselves to death.
dca 17y ago
Manned missions involving highly trained air force pilots and school teachers on a government funded space ferry seem undesirable. Manned space flight involving random wealthy civilians seems to have taken its place. Perhaps folks are tired of sending the typical astronaut to space on some government mission on their dime, and are ready to go themselves. If commercial space flight catches hold and the price comes down, my guess is people will get interested again real quick as it becomes a realistic candidate for the old "bucket list".
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
mechanical_fish 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs
juhbiu 17y ago
High speed trains don't capture the human imagination in the same way as steam trains. Volvos with air bags and seatbelts don't have the same response as 50s Studebakers. And tunnel boring machines aren't as picturesque as 1000s of slaves chipping away at rock with stone tools - it's called progress.
- narag 17y ago
  If we want to send people far away in the long term, there are certaint problems involving people in space that are not solved sending unmanned spacecrafts. We need to actually send people. Ships with antiradiation shells, autonomous and sustainable life-support, etc.
  - borism 17y ago
    we have people in orbit for that right now
    - berntb 17y ago
      Inside the Van Allen belts, removes most of the radiation problem (GP -- "antiradiation shells"). Also, the space station get resupply from Earth. Doesn't solve GP's "autonomous and sustainable life-support". The space station isn't a complete waste, but it just doesn't tackle those problems. (Disclaimer -- I'm very much not a rocket engineer.)
  - euccastro 17y ago
    We can solve those problems when they become relevant. Until we know what's out there we can't know when we'll want to send people far away. And we better use robots for solving one problem a time, at least in early experimentation. For example, make robots measure absorbed radiation, to test those antiradiation shells. Or make them build a sustainable water supply and farm in the target planet, to prove it can be done. That could be cheaper, and less risky in human lives, than trying to juggle all balls at once.
    - 17y ago
justinhj 17y ago
Another long term strategy would be to live in a sustainable way on this planet. Perhaps we could crack that first. The sun is good for another 5 billion years.
- holygoat 17y ago
  Sustainability is a nonsense if a comet impacts the earth. You don't run a service on one machine; you use redundancy to reduce the chance of catastrophic failure.
  - euccastro 17y ago
    If we can't live sustainably in the planet we were evolved in, what good is spending our efforts trying to colonize others? If you have a service that leaks memory like crazy, you want to fix that before replicating it to a cluster of refurbished 486s.
  - justinhj 17y ago
    You need sustainability first then worry about redundancy. One requires a complete revolution in human thought and behaviour. The other, expansion and technical problem solving, comes naturally.

by Flankk 17y ago

borism 17y ago

Manned missions don't catch people's imagination anymore either. "Space-optimism" of 60-70s is long gone. Now is the time to do real work in outer space.

rbanffy 17y ago
It depends. We can't say for sure manned spaceflight doesn't catch people's imagination because since the early 70's we really don't send people anywhere interesting. Er can't blame people: the ISS is as exciting as camping on your backyard. It may solve some problems and help develop some technologies important for future space travelers, but it's difficult to call it space exploration when you don't explore anything. The state of science education also doesn't help either. Most people cannot appreciate how devilishly hard is to keep a presence in LEO. As for keeping a presence on the Moon, it is important because we have to perfect a lot of protocols before we can pretend to be ready for a trip to Mars and, if anything goes wrong, rescue is a week away. Even if you have to process a couple tons of rocks to get a liter of water, it would be cheaper than to send it from Earth and by landing a couple automated water factories before any humans venture there could also reduce the risks (and costs) further as they wouldn't have to carry a lot of water.
- borism 17y ago
  But that's why we shouldn't do manned missions first!
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    You can't perfect the manned spaceflight protocols with unmanned probes. The Moon is a stepping stone towards Mars and, if we can mine lunar regolith for metals, water and propellant (LOX, LH2), we are golden: the lunar base can become the best spot for building and launching spacecraft. I wonder if there is carbon and nitrogen there too. That would make colonization much simpler.
anigbrowl 17y ago
That's because they don't do anything groundbreaking. Not to run down the hard work of astronauts and mission planners - I am very cognizant of the effort and achievement that goes into things like maintaining the Hubble telescope for so long. The Space Shuttle was cool, tremendously cool - we built a reusable spacecraft. That blew my mind in the 1980s. So did the idea of a space station, and indeed the ISS is also fairly cool - although people would be a lot impressed if it was bigger and had rotational gravity. The reason the space-optimism is gone is twofold: 1) it is hard to do stuff in space, and it's true there's not so much we could usefully do on the moon, that would have immediate, obvious short term benefits; but 2) it's been >30 years since we [qua humanity] went to the moon and even though we've done all sort of insane technical stuff with lasers, computers, and what-not, it seems - especially to the casual onlooker - that we can't think of a single interesting thing to do on the Moon now that we couldn't have done 30 years ago. 1) is an issue, for sure (although I feel limited by my own lack of scientific knowledge in considering the possible benefits). But 2) just pisses me off. We can't think of anything cool and somewhat affordable that we could do on the moon? Really? Even with robots? Moon TV NOW godammit!
donaq 17y ago
You know what would really capture people's imaginations? Space piracy. With frikkin' laser beams. Once there are bad guys in space stealing our shit, you can be sure the public will rally around the idea of sending good guys into space.

nazgulnarsil 17y ago

sending people into space right now is grandstanding. the resources that go into it would be better spent preparing for true permanent habitation of other planets.

patio11 17y ago
If you want to invest a lot of money in making a place livable for humans, might I suggest Detroit or Africa? I'm not even kidding. If we're going to spend a few billion, lets save some lives with it, rather than produce extraordinarily expensive screensavers for geeks.
- nazgulnarsil 17y ago
  feed starving man. starving man survives to father 2 children in a region that obviously could not even support him. we've just doubled suffering in our system. when you pour money into a country and you see no increase in the standard of living because 1: the aid is siphoned off by corruption and used for further violence 2: the population increases up to the new maximal carrying capacity should you really continue aid? see also: dead aid http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254067031&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374...
  - btilly 17y ago
    This argument was originally due to Malthus, and was used by the English to justify not helping the Irish during the Irish Potato Famine. Shortly thereafter improvements in agriculture made it clear that Europe could sustain much, much larger populations. The specter of mass famine from population growth was popular in the 60s. Predictions then focused on India. But improvements in agriculture resulted in calories/capita improving 23% from 1960 to 2000 despite a doubling in population. Given historical precedent and ongoing improvements in agriculture (many of which have not taken hold in Africa yet), is it morally sound to repeat the failed argument today? Besides which, the biggest cause of famine today is political strife, not carrying capacity. To pick a random example, Ethiopia was a net exporter of food during the famous famines there in the 1980s. The famines occurred in a region called Eritrea that was undergoing a civil war, and were supported by the government as a way of weakening the resistance. And finally around the world we are finding that population growth is faster among poor people than rich. So helping people attain a decent standard of living seems to be a more effective method of population control than encouraging them to starve themselves to death.

dca 17y ago

Manned missions involving highly trained air force pilots and school teachers on a government funded space ferry seem undesirable. Manned space flight involving random wealthy civilians seems to have taken its place. Perhaps folks are tired of sending the typical astronaut to space on some government mission on their dime, and are ready to go themselves. If commercial space flight catches hold and the price comes down, my guess is people will get interested again real quick as it becomes a realistic candidate for the old "bucket list".

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

mechanical_fish 17y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs

juhbiu 17y ago

High speed trains don't capture the human imagination in the same way as steam trains. Volvos with air bags and seatbelts don't have the same response as 50s Studebakers. And tunnel boring machines aren't as picturesque as 1000s of slaves chipping away at rock with stone tools - it's called progress.

narag 17y ago
If we want to send people far away in the long term, there are certaint problems involving people in space that are not solved sending unmanned spacecrafts. We need to actually send people. Ships with antiradiation shells, autonomous and sustainable life-support, etc.
- borism 17y ago
  we have people in orbit for that right now
  - berntb 17y ago
    Inside the Van Allen belts, removes most of the radiation problem (GP -- "antiradiation shells"). Also, the space station get resupply from Earth. Doesn't solve GP's "autonomous and sustainable life-support". The space station isn't a complete waste, but it just doesn't tackle those problems. (Disclaimer -- I'm very much not a rocket engineer.)
- euccastro 17y ago
  We can solve those problems when they become relevant. Until we know what's out there we can't know when we'll want to send people far away. And we better use robots for solving one problem a time, at least in early experimentation. For example, make robots measure absorbed radiation, to test those antiradiation shells. Or make them build a sustainable water supply and farm in the target planet, to prove it can be done. That could be cheaper, and less risky in human lives, than trying to juggle all balls at once.
  - 17y ago

justinhj 17y ago

Another long term strategy would be to live in a sustainable way on this planet. Perhaps we could crack that first. The sun is good for another 5 billion years.

holygoat 17y ago
Sustainability is a nonsense if a comet impacts the earth. You don't run a service on one machine; you use redundancy to reduce the chance of catastrophic failure.
- euccastro 17y ago
  If we can't live sustainably in the planet we were evolved in, what good is spending our efforts trying to colonize others? If you have a service that leaks memory like crazy, you want to fix that before replicating it to a cluster of refurbished 486s.
- justinhj 17y ago
  You need sustainability first then worry about redundancy. One requires a complete revolution in human thought and behaviour. The other, expansion and technical problem solving, comes naturally.