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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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 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
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.