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The Wrong Stuff
b00le writes "The New York Review of Books has a trenchant piece,
The Wrong Stuff by the great Steven Weinberg, arguing against the utility of manned spaceflight, which he feels has a largely political or sentimental function. He adds: '...I have taken the President's space initiative seriously. That may be a mistake.' Even so, his argument is detailed and rich in facts, particularly the nasty economic kind."
I'm starting to think we'll never see any real space development until a new, radical propulsion technology comes along. Until then, it just costs too much to heave things out of the gravity well. Incremental advances seem unlikely to do it - it requires an orders-of-magnitude shift in cost.
Once we have the new technology, space will be roughly on par with ocean exploration for cost.
think: one tiny little speck of living matter that manages to hitch a ride on one of those probes and ends up on the Martian surface may have massive consequences for that planet in times to come. I think we shouldn't be visiting Mars until we can be certain of this issue.
no.. it doesn't exist "because it exists", it exists because of our hunger for knowledge, which I will grant you is not always rational. I've taken apart clocks, and a lot of stuff. it made no sense whatsoever, economically. however, I now know a little about the inner workings of a clock. same with manned spaceflight. why do we do it? because we can learn stuff. many people want to learn stuff, and given the chance, they will. so why do we learn stuff? because we can.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Economics? Indeed ...
Mr. Weinberg isn't talking economics. He is, after all, a physicist. On actually reading the full article, you see arguments against the actual scientific utility of space travel. Arguments such as these:
Much of the "scientific" program assigned to astronauts on the space shuttle and the space station has the flavor of projects done for a high school science talent contest. Some of the work looks interesting, but it is hard to see why it has to be done by people.
...
Looking into the future, we need to ask, what scientific work can be done by astronauts on Mars? They can walk around and look at the terrain, and carry out tests on rocks, looking for signs of water or life, but all that can be done by robots. They can bring back rock samples, as the Apollo astronauts did from the moon, but that too can be done by robots.
...
It is hoped that while vast sums are being spent on manned space flight missions, a little money will be diverted to real science. I think that this attitude is self-defeating. Whenever NASA runs into trouble, it is science that is likely to be sacrificed first. After NASA had pushed the Apollo program to the point where people stopped watching lunar landings on television, it canceled Apollo 18 and 19, the missions that were to be specifically devoted to scientific research.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
The only argument that manned spaceflight must be undertaken is that the Sun will eventually go nova and destroy the Earth...
Current thinking isn't that a nova will destroy the Earth, since novae are usually associated with compact objects like white dwarfs. Instead, the death of life on Earth will occur when the Sun goes through its red giant phase, expanding to such a degree that it envelops the Earth. This expansion, which is due to happen in about 5 billion years, won't be a rapid event; it will take a few million years. So the Sci-Fi books that have the Sun exploding are just plain wrong.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
is that it captivates the minds of our youth, and inspires them to enter careers in science and engineering. Robot probes do this, but IMHO manned space does it even better. The urge to 'go someplace new' is built into all of us, and though the Earth is big, and arguably parts (like the ocean depths) are poorly explored, space most truly qualifies as 'infinite' in its possiblities.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Did it occur to you that we could get hit by a chunk of space rock tomorrow that would spell "game over" for our species? It's bound to happen long before we need to worry about the Sun going nova. Do you keep off-site backups of your critical data? In my opinion we should be doing at least a good a job of protecting the existence of our species, and it would be a real shame if we failed to do so not because we lack the technology, but because we'd rather piss the money away on bread and circuses.
Mr. Weinberg argues that there is little scientific or economic value to be gained from sending people in space. I agree to some extend... there is little to be gained or learned from continuing to send up people in Space Shuttles to live in the ISS, eg. to continue doing what we have been doing for the past few decades.
However, there is much to be gained from manned missions to Mars, or from having a base on the moon. If anything, we will learn a good deal about doing manned deep space missions, and we may even learn how to do them cheaper or more efficiently. We will have to do a great many new things to accomplish these missions, which some people see as a risk. I see these not as risks, but as opportunities to push the envelope and advance the science of space flight. For too long we have been doing (relatively) safe, boring missions using proven technology like the ISS, Space Shuttle, Proton, Ariane, Soyuz and so on. All that is fine for commercial missions, but it does little to advance the science. What we need is to do new things and learn from them. I believe manned missions should be part of that, precisely because of the challenges and risks involved... one learns by doing things that are hard and untried, not by sticking with easy and safe challenges.
Lastly, mr. Weinberg refers a few times to the 'drama of people in space', as the reason why NASA and politicians are so keen on manned space flight. I see that 'drama' as a very useful spin-off: something to capture the imagination of the people, and perhaps even inspire them to pursue a career and education in aerospace or other technical vocations.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I think space exploration is a necessity and not a commodity. The complete ecological system is so fragile and many parameters (asteroids, energy output of the sun) are out of human control that it would be negligent not to secure the prolonged human existence by going into space.
You may argue, that if the human race destroys their homeplanet, the fate would be deserved. But i believe, that you can only learn from a lesson you (as individual or race) survive.
Regards, Martin
Did you know they're revising policies so kids can't get held back for being behind in math or science anymore, and so kids are automatically promoted ahead a grade if they've already been held back in the past? Let's fix this crap back home before setting foot elsewhere.
Many space enthusiasts believe passionately in "man's destiny in the stars" as a thing inherently good in and of itself, the kind of principle without dependence upon rationality that forms the basis of religious belief.
Bullshit. Earth is a single point of failure for the human race. It only takes one catastrophic event to completely wipe us out. Unless we put a hell of a lot of effort into setting up self-sufficient colonies, we are gambling with the future of humanity, plain and simple.
This isn't a matter of faith. This is a matter of common sense. How many times have you seen the attitude "it'll never happen to us" fall down?
For something that already costed a big percent of sending a man out there, you are very limited on what you can do, how can react, or the creativeness you can develop, are not so much more than a telescope powerful enough (well, maybe with more senses).
Of course, maybe a manned mission that costed too much more, and with a lot of risks, and, even that finally ended sucessfully, did not needed that human intervention, don't happened nothing that needed yes or yes our creativity or ability to react to things that were not thinked months or years ago on earth, but... what if that abilities would made a difference?
Ok, so it is estimated that many billions of dollars would be spent for Bush's space plan. Many people are whining about how the money could be better spent elsewhere. Let me ask you a question, where do you think the money goes? It just doesn't evaporate into thin air. This money will be spent paying salaries and buying manufactured parts from hundreds of manufacturers. I'm sure that some parts will come from overseas, but most of the money will go right back into the US economy. And I'll throw in how it will probably add some hi-tech manufacturing jobs.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Remember, it is much easier to send up our nuclear waste and shoot it into the Sun. Nobody is doing that now, simply because it is too risky and too damn expensive.
Once we have instant communication between points, and robots that are as intelligent, adaptable and capable as human beings, then I could see a point to stopping manned exploration.
However, there will never be a time when man does not need to be in space. I do not fault manned space exploration, but I do fault NASA for perpetuating the idea that it has to be expensive. (Mostly due to cost-plus outsourcing.)
We must move into space at some time to avoid total annihilation as the sun dies. The amount of resources available in space (not to mention the fact that we wouldn't have to waste land to get at them) are reason enough to push out there. Robots can't do it (for a lot of reasons), but people can.
If not now, when? If not us, who?
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
here is a healthy list for you
Algorithms vs Software Engineering
Engineering will always happen when theory needs to be monetized. Why do we need the state to push for that with taxpayer money - let investors push for space travel thru private ventures - it is after all, a speculative venture.
Seriously people, in the evolution of humanity, it is always fundamental science that is responsible for those huge leaps in progress. All engineering does is verification. eg. You can theorize and "prove" conclusively that space travel is feasible. Actually travelling in space is simply verifying that theorem.
People need a course in hard math, you know, third order differential equations & stuff of that nature, to appreciate that distinction. Most of what makes Computer Science so effective today - - those rigorous algorithms - were invented in the 60s & 70s. But geeks take more pride in Moore's law & chipspeeds & RAM size & so on. That's just engineering, its not that hard ( comparitively speaking ).
If I had a billion dollars to burn, rather than fund a pipedream like putting humans on Mars, I'd spend 900 million on eradicating malaria & smallpox & things like that which kill millions in Africa even today...who can think of space when real people around you are dying ? And I'd use 100 million to fund 10,000 scientists under 25, for research in Fundamental Sciences - math, physics, theoretical CS, that kind of stuff.
Remember - Engineering will always happen when theory needs to be monetized.
If humans never develop the technology for interstellar space travel, in about 500 million years there will be no "elsewhere" to spend the money.
While I must agree, Bush's "vision" has nothing to do with the space program and everything to do with election year, the point is that if you're for the survival of the human race, nothing is more important than the space program.
Humans are currently trapped on this little blue dot, and long before the sun goes poof, the Earth will not be able to support human life.
So where exactly did you want to spend the money? Medical research? Doesn't help when the human race is gone. Ending world hunger? There won't be anyone left to be hungry anyway.
The space program? It's risky, expensive, and full of unknowns, sure. Perhaps it's not even physically possible to travel fast enough to reach other solar systems. Perhaps, even if it were, there's no place out there for humans. But... if there is... and if it is possible... It's humanity's only chance for survival. So I guess it all comes down to: How much is the survival of the human race worth to you? Once you come up with a figure on that, compare it to NASA's budget.
I can imagine a future for humanity out among the stars... but it will never happen without lots of money for manned spaceflight. It can only happen if more people view the space program as humanity's only hope. It will only happen when people become more concerned with the distant future of humanity than day-to-day life on Earth. Anyway, I've said too much already I guess... at least my sig fits nicely with this post.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I want the most megabytes for my buck
Then you want the unmanned missions. Google around for it. You will be amazed at the huge disparity in costs, manned vs unmanned. Absolutely all science done on the space station or any manned platform could have been done by robots (other than science on humans in space). Every science claim that NASA has made by humans in space could have been done by robots or on the ground. Even their big perfect crystal claims have been shown to be overblown, they never made crystals in space that could not have been made on the ground or by machines in space.
As for cost, look at these rovers, what, $200M each or both? A manned mission would be a hundred times as expensive, and altho it might well return more data, it would not necessarily return a lot more useful data. A hundred signs of ancient water is not much more convincng than the few found by the rovers.
If you want bang for the buck, you want machines.
Now me, the only reason that I think proper for humans in space is adventure and tourism. All that guff about spreading to a different planet or star to have redundancy in case of a comet disaster wiping us out, well great, it ain't going to happen on the current crop of expensive launchers, it's going to happen because tourists flood the orbital hotels and cities and want to take trips to Mars, not because a few humans take a long expensive "science" trip.
Infuriate left and right
While as little as a few dozen would contain the requisite genetic diversity to repopulate the earth, you aren't thinking right... It's relatively expensive to sustain life on earth because of the high gravity. The necessary maintenance diet is in the thousands of calories, but on the Moon, for example, it would be far smaller. At the same time, the moon isn't hampered by an atmosphere to block the sun's energy allowing for higher power conversion rates per unit area, and the abundance of metal oxides combined with the abundance of vacuum should allow a population on the moon to generate plenty of steel, titanium, and oxygen once their industrial base reached adequate size. If enough carbon and nitrogen is imported, along with "starter soil," a self-sustaining agricultural base could be created to feed the inhabitants and maintain the atmosphere.
A mature settlement on the Moon would have a self-sustaining population of 5 billion, not 5 thousand. It would be the ideal base of operations for expansion into the rest of the solar system and beyond, as well as the ideal place to do space propulsion research. Living below the surface of Mercury, in the clouds on Venus, on Mars and its moons, as well as on/in the more significant asteroids, while at the same time exploiting the unexploited areas of the Earth, we could eventually support 100 billion people in the solar system.
Manned spaceflight as it has been is meaningless, because it has been undertaken under the guise of meaningful scientific research done in space. This research is largely pointless because even if new phenomena are discovered, they have no practical application because we have no industrial base in space. The ultimate goal of manned spaceflight is the propagation of our species, and NASA should focus on making a self-sustaining Moon base over satisfying intellectual curiosity with extravagant probe missions. Why? Because with a self-sustaining Moon base we could send 1000 probes for every 1 we can send from earth. More importantly, though, with a mature presence in space we'd have several times as many minds working on the universe's problems... Rather, if the ultimate goal of all human endeavor is scientific discovery, then increasing the number of humans will greatly increase the amount of science undertaken.
As for settling the bottom of the oceans (raised elsewhere), that's more of a stupid counter argument than a justifiable alternative. The bottom of the oceans are energy poor, even compared to mars, and the structures would be much harder to build because they must keep out enormous pressures while withstanding the stresses of an active plate tectonics system. Without energy to grow food and/or drive chemical/industrial processes, the bottom of the ocean is more of a campsite/vacation destination than a viable alternative to permanent settlement of space. The bottom of the ocean would provide us with more real estate to build apartment buildings and whatnot, but we have a very long way to go in terms of increasing the carrying capacity of the earth and reducing sprawl before such a development would be necessary.
The problem with new launchers, especially SSTO, is that they are long on promises and short on delivery.
I know of over a hundred promised vehicles over the past 50 years that have made many of the same promises as Skylon and failed to deliver, so call me when it's flying.
Off the top of my head... Roton, X-33, Conestoga, Kelly Spaceplane, Wernher Von Braun's shuttle, the space shuttle, Buran, Kistler, and more.
People keep hyping the benefits of technological gains from sending humans to Mars, but there are much greater technological gains to be made from a massive expansion of robotic exploration of the galaxy. In addition to most of the earth-useful technological advancements you would get from research into a manned mission, you would also get great advances in the fields of AI and robotics, which are potentially on the cusp of real and revolutionary breakthroughs within the next two decades. Furthermore, the manned space flight to Mars won't even begin any kind of implementation until at least 2015-2020. If we were sending large numbers of robots into space and pouring money into this research over these intervening years, how much more powerful will these robots be by that time? I don't really believe the 1000-to-1 mission ratio that the article states between robots and manned missions per dollar, but it's still quite high. How much improvement would we see after 20 years and several hundred iterations? Finally, the manned plan doesn't realize any of these benefits for probably at least 20 years. With robots I think you would get at least as much benefit, but it would come sooner because it can be done continuously starting *now*. Take all the advances that happen in the intervening years and then compound all of the private sector innovation that happens when the technology trickles down from NASA and I don't see how a manned mission could stack up.
One small caveat - the future of mankind depends on colonization, not exploration. Until we find a way to have a sustatainable colony, then we are tourists. Sending a man to mars really isn't that big of a technical challenge (relatively). We have already sent people to the moon, and we have sent rovers to Mars. The only real transportation challenge would be landing. Sending a man to Mars will only take time and money.
If we are serious about getting our eggs out of this basket then we need to start working out how to survive on Mars. Starting with and how to design a structure that can be completely repaired without help from earth, how to grow food, how to generate enough energy, and finally how to create all the materials we need on mars itself. Eventually we will need to try this stuff out on Mars, and we will have to do things in stages - there is no way we will be completely sustainable on the first try. But there is a ton that we can and should be doing here on Earth. We should be working on taking stuff like this to the next level.
I don't want our Mars mission to turn into another Apollo, where we have a wonderfull achievment and then the program dies because there is nothing to do up there. Or worse another ISS. When we send a man to mars I want us to be sending a trailbreaker, not a political statement.
I was thinking more like:
"Weinberg arguing against a Bush program... shocking!"
I met Dr. Weinberg a few times when I was at UT. He teaches 1 undergrad course, the second semester of quantum mechanics. He has a rep of being kind of a jerk, and I found him a total liberal eletist.
He was also the main speaker at my sister's graduation (UT class of 2001). He went on a huge rant about how the state should adopt more liberal ploicies on spending, start an income tax, etc. Lots of people booed.
I felt it was pretty inappropriate to use that opportunity to voice is political views. Although this is an evaluative essay, it of course caries some of his bias:
"In my view the worst problem facing our society is not that there is a scarcity of private goods--food or clothing or SUVs or consumer electronics--but rather that there are sick people who cannot get health care, drug addicts who cannot get into rehabilitation programs, ports vulnerable to terrorist attack, insufficient resources to deal with Afghanistan and Iraq, and American children who are being left behind."
There you have it... "drug addicts who cannot get into rehabilitation programs" is 1 of the worst problems facing society.
Of course he thinks space research is a waste, it competes with his own field.
"no one in the White House is interested in anyway, like research on black holes and cosmology."
The guy's brilliant at physics, but does everything have to be about politics?
I served as a USAF medic for eight years, including Desert Storm; you will, I trust, acknowledge that I've earned the right to comment on this.
The sympathy for the GIs in Iraq who are facing the possibility of death every day is not feigned at all. It's a horrible job. No sane soldier wants to die in battle, ever -- anyone who does is much more of a threat to himself and his unit than he is to the enemy. Like Patton said, "Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to go out there and manke the other son of a bitch die for his country." A glorious death may be a useful recruiting tool for idealistic 18-year-olds, but that fantasy tends to wear off pretty damn fast the first time you actually see someone get shot.
I considered it a great honor to serve my country. I'm proud of my service. But what I'm proud of is that I saved lives -- not that my parents had to worry for months that they would get their son home in a body bag.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You forget about option 4.
4. Bob Hyper Rich Guy is the first human that has personal assests in the multi-trillions.
Bob hates Star Wars, Star Trek and most Science Fiction. Bob loves money and power. Bob starts to feel like God. Bob decides to his proper palance view of Earth should be through a self-sustaining asteriod colony. Bob doesn't waste his money. Bob outsources most of the work to the Russians and Chineese a pays about a 1/2 billion. Bob Hyper Rich Guy's kids own the solar system traffic because the own the high orbitals.
However, a book is still just handwaving. He asserts that it can be done for 1.5 orders of magnitude less then $1T, and I'm pointing out that mega-aerospace projects often exceed initial cost estimates by 1.5 orders of magnitude. (Or would exceed the cost if finished. The majority of large space projects started in the last 40 years were cancelled once it was realized how much they would really end up costing.) Just because he's using clever ideas doesn't make the proposed project immune to development problems.
I will admit that I lost interest when the author started dropping numbers I had recently seen in This article.
See that "Preview" button?