Slashdot Mirror
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."
How can we justify space exploration when we've yet to plumb the depths of the oceans. There's plenty of sub-aquatic territory to be exploited, sorry, explored. What with all those giant squid there must be enough calamari to feed the entire third world.
on slashdot ?*
Oh, the horror.
*Houston, we have a problem.
Sent from your iPad.
He's right, this money is better spent elsewhere. Bush just wants to create a legacy.
He adds: '...I have taken the President's space initiative seriously. That may be a mistake.'
Isn't it a mistake to take anything G. W. Bush says seriously...?
The thing with manned space flight is, it A) provides inspiration, something with is sorely lacking these days, B) Paves the way for more and better space exploration and C) Has incalculably valuable spinoffs that change our daily lives for the better. If that isn't a reason, I don't know what is.
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.
Now really! Where does Mr Weinberg get of applying /economics/ to space travel? Space travel has the potential to bring us beyond economics, beyond all of the petty social sciences, to the grand future that all of us who have been reading the right sort of science fiction know very well.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
One of the things which drives peoples' passion for manned spaceflight is that for many atheists it takes the same place that religion does for others - providing a reference point for the future. 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.
The only argument that manned spaceflight must be undertaken is that the Sun will eventually go nova and destroy the Earth; consequently, we had better think of a way off. Since we don't anticipate this happening within the next hundred years, however, and we do anticipate the continued advance of technology, why not ignore the question for a few hundred years and then start investigating manned spaceflight (at much less effort required)?
The answer, for many space enthusiasts, is that manned spaceflight is simply a thing which must happen, because it must. And this kind of irrational "it exists because it exists" principle is the same that many claim to despise in religion.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Weinberg's opinion is no news. Bob Park already said it in his book Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud and in his testimony before the Commitee on Sicence, Subcommitee on Space and Aeronautics (April 9th, 1997)
Manned space flight for the purposes of science and exploration is not necessary yet. We've proven with the great success of the recent Mars rover missions that we don't need to endanger humans to explore our immediate neighborhood. The basic things we want to study on other planets can be studied by a robot.
If people want to cowboy around in space, fine. Privatize it, build up a space tourism industry, and take the risks that way. But when you lose human lives on the government's dollar, you risk shutting down scientific progress for years while the government "investigates".
Steve Weinberg is a dimwit.
I would have to disagree; and so would the 1979 Nobel commitee, who awarded him the prize for physics. For those who aren't familiar with him, his best-known work has been in unifying the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces. More information can be gleaned from his biography.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
There are two issues here - exploration and discovery. The precept of the article falls solidly on the latter. The future of mankind depends on the former.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
Ah, yes, once again we see that famous 1 Trillion Dollars figure. That's 1 Trillion Dollars using technologies and methodologies that are 15 years out of date to be spent over 30+ years and including missions that have already been accomplished and other missions not directly related to the Moon or Mars. This is becoming the stuff of Urban Legend. If you haven't read http://www.thespacereview.com/article/119/1, I highly encourage it. It appears to be a very thorough debunking of that whole misinformation campaign and clearly points the finger for bad numbers at media outlets as opposed to real accountants who are directly involved.
Omeganon
I agree completely and I also think Weinberg is quite intelligent.
Of course, the irony here is that Weinberg himself was motivated by economic arguments to move in 1982 from Harvard to the University of Texas, which could afford a prestigious Nobel Laureate because of oil money.
That would be the same U.S. state and the same industry that supports the current U.S. President who is proposing this space program.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The one thing that everyone seems to be ignoring is the HUGE amount of wealth that is waiting in the asteroid belt. There is enough iron, nickel steel, copper, platinum, gold, and other materials out there to return any investment 1000 times over. All that would be required is an ionic ramjet which could install a solid fuel motor onto an asteroid and propel it into Earth's orbit. Wait a few years and BAM! 100 billion dollars worth of minerals. An economic waste? I don't think so...
Still Rampant, Wowbagger
I'm up for space exploration and all, but I suppose that a trillion bucks would go a long way towards solving AIDS, cancer, hunger and poverty...
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
I don't know about you, but I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. (Then I wanted to be an astrophysicist. Now I'm in EECS. Life's a bitch.)
I'm sure space travel will become (by necessity if nothing else) more common in a few hundred years - but I'll be dead.
As manned space travel becomes more common the likelyhood that Joe Average might be able to 'go up' increases - so I'd guess the reason for a push for manned missions has nothing to do with science or pride, but that deep inside, we all want to be astronauts.
Rational? No. Truly useful? Not yet. Fulfilling? Fuck yes.
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.
I think the major flaw in all these 'arguments' why we shouldn't go into space is that they always set economic factors as a premise.
;-)
But, although economic viability is important to create a mass-usuage of space(travel), I fail to see why it should be the only possible motive to start exploring space. It's a pretty narrowminded, materialistic and typical capitalistic view on things. It's the same view that makes progress on medication for very rare diseases so slow: corporations can't see how they are ever going to get profit out of it, so they all turn their backs on it.
If ppl (including states) are only going to do something when they are sure of an immediate profitable return, the world has become a sad place. (And we should leave it the sooner
Arguments based on such a viewpoint fail to recognise other incentives apart from economical ones.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
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
If Noah had taken that attitude when he was thinking about building the Ark, where would be we today?
The question is not 'is it worth spending x dollars and y effort to put a man on Mars when we could explore space in other ways', because that hasn't happened and there is no particular reason to suppose it's going to happen.
:(
The question is, 'is it worth spending x dollars and y effort on boosting an election campaign by messing around with NASA when we could look visionary in other ways'.
I'd say not. They could have made any number of far-fetched plans that don't cost money or show results for a decade -- but they had to pick the one that involves screwing space research _now_
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The advocates of purely unmanned space exploration often claim that the same accomplishments that can be done with people can be done with unmanned probes of various varieties. To a point, they are right. Frex, Spirit and Opportunity are doing some of the things that a human being would have done.
However! For as long as Spirit and Opportunity have been working though - something on the order of 80 days - would have taken a person less than a week, if not even a day to do. Additionally, a lot more would have been done. A trained human geologist with a spade, rock hammer, and camera are far, far more flexible than any robotic mission can be for many, many decades.
I suspect that when you look at it from the POV of ROI based on science collected, that the manned-unmanned argument gets even more interesting. Before using the Apollo missions as a strawman, keep in mind that there would be massive differences between the Apollo missions and whatever US, other national or international missions to Mars: almost everyone on the new missions would be a trained scientist and do far, far more scientific work.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
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?
Like these: http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
STS (the Space [Shuttle] Transportation System) is a flawed system design, with little compromise or tolerance for failures, systemic or political. On that issue alone, STS must be replaced.
A much smaller Shuttle-like orbiter, which can be mated atop a Delta, Titan III or other medium-lift vehicle, is needed. It may look like the Crew Return Vehicle concept that's being rehashed into a shuttle replacement. I think it would have more merit to the old military DynaSoar project. Such a vehicle, unlike the Shuttle Orbiters we have, is not a truck...it would be a human taxi, with a small bay for some replacement consumables. For larger payloads and refurbs, use the old Orbiters--unmanned, remote controlled. If we can run robots from millions of miles away, we can surely do the same from low Earth orbit. In fact, the Russians showed it can be done with their own mortibund Shuttle--it's first and only flight was completely unmanned, from launch to landing. The old Orbiters would also double as rescue vehicles, along with having additional new Shuttle Taxis ready to go on other pads when a flight is in progress. We can't use single-use rockets for ISS refurbs since the pressurized cargo modules (like the special ones used by Orbiters during an ISS crew and experiment transition) has equipment that must come back. Only our Orbiters have the ability to return large equipment modules safely to Earth.
We should be able to adapt single-use rockets to send new ISS components for assembly. The ISS will need more arms, and a new Orbiter replacement might need something like the current Canadian remote arm.
The main thing I would recommend is (1) just make a reusable human taxi that (1) has an abort mode like the old Apollo spacecraft, where the new Orbiter can rocket away from the booster, as well as (2) a durable crew compartment that, in the case of normal reentry failure, could be separated from the larger body and land by parachute.
Baby steps, please. A Shuttle replacement need not be all things as our current ones tried to be. For LEO, a simple crew vehicle will work. Later, the ISS or a moonbase should be used to create new, true spacecraft that ferry and from the Moon, and can use lunar material to build a Mars vehicle.
When someone says that the cost to go to space is too expensive, I have to emphasize where the money goes to build the spacecraft. It's not like we take millions of dollar bills, smelt them into vehicles or stuff bills in the fuel tanks and set them afire. That money goes to WORKERS who build the space vehicles and COMPANIES that make jobs. That's economically a Good Thing.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
An interesting observation by Prof Weinberg is that we could have built and launched seven Hubble telescopes via unmanned rockets compared to the cost of the original, much delayed, shuttle launch and subsequent servicing missions. Instead of four upgrades over 20 years, we would have had seven upgrades over 25 years.
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."
Look, let's take politics out of this. Space exploration at this point in history is about doing science and obtaining data. For some things, that's better left to machines. Gas giant probes are a perfect example.
For geologic work however, humans just plain do a better job. The current two probes, God bless them, would have been pretty much useless if humans were up there instead. To grossly over simplify it, I want the most megabytes for my buck. If a human can send back 100 megabytes of scientific data as opposed to 10 from a robot, send the human. if it's the other way around, send the robotic probe.
This shouldn't he a fight of man vs. machine. It should be an intelligent decision of whom or what to send on a particular mission. For some it will be humans and for some robots. They are not mutually exclusive for space exploration.
Blaze a trail to the New World
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.
To say that we shouldn't fly men into space because it costs a lot of money is roughtly analog to this:
The first automobiles (better know as 'cars' today) were hidiously expencive and highly unreliable machines. Horses were cheaper, more reliable and even selfreprodusing. By applying the same echonomic logic, people should not have started using cars at all, but keept to the horse... or at least done so until cars could be massmanufacured cheaply (hint: ford would never have started massproducing cars if there wasn't a market - catch 22 anyone?)
Going into space is going to cost a lot. Not going into space might cost us the future.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
I have very mixed feelings about this. I think Weinberg is basically correct on the issues. But I do feel that at some point, the continuity of the human race may depend on not having all it's eggs in one basket.
However, there's a huge "but" that follows that last paragraph. Right now, putting huge amounts of resources into some sort of manned spaceflight is ridiculous from a scientific perspective and offers no real lessons on ultimately how we're going to do some sort of sustainable long-distance space flight. What, we can't manage to get Biodome working, and we're supposedly going to have Mars colonies?
Putting on my futurist cap for a moment (much like a dunce cap with the advantage that no-one notices it) I'd have to say that there are three major alternatives for how things will develop overall.
1. We all are wiped out in the shortish term by { global warming, killer viruses, giant asteroid, the covering of all Earth's arable land with AOL disks, etc}. In this situation, manned space flight might add a couple artifacts for the alien archeologists to ponder, but isn't going to matter.
2. We see a continued explosion of new technologies in the areas biotech, advanced physics, computing, etc. In this case, why try manned space flight now? What are we going to learn from pushing 1990s technology to eke out a single, unsustainable dash to Mars and back, when there are so many other interesting problems that can drive science. The money would be better spent elsewhere.
3. We neither wipe ourselves out nor see a explosion of new technology; instead, the rate of change goes down and we converge on a pleasant, fairly quiet future. Moore's law comes to an end, biotech doesn't turn out to produce amazing new developments affordably, modern physics offers no real practical advances in day-to-day life. Perhaps gradual technical progress and the dissemination of technologies to the third world makes Earth a nice, comfortable planet. But ultimately, things in 2200 look pretty recognizable to someone from 1980.
In this case, we'll never manage to achieve the sorts of technologies required to leave the solar system or set up a long-term presence anywhere else. I think this future is to some extent the most interesting because no-one takes it seriously - the assumption of a lot of people is that just because we've seen an incredible explosion of new technologies since the industrial revolution, this explosive growth of knowledge and expertise will continue forever.
That may be true - but I think many people (particularly Slashdot nerds) would benefit from thinking about alternative courses. Maybe we'll have to solve all those human-scale problems (war, enivronmental destruction, poverty, disease, human suffering, etc.) without the benefit of self-replicating autonomous nanotech, real AI, faster-than-light travel, Dyson spheres and all those great science-fictional constructs.
To some extent, I think science fiction provides the secular humanist's equivalent of the Rapture. When asked about an enviromental issue, Reagan's secretary of the interior (James Watts, I believe) reponded that he didn't think the environment is such a big deal because this might the last generation before the Rapture. Listening to futurists, I often get the same kind of feeling that they think that today's issues are about as important as an industrial dispute among buggy whip makers in 1910.
Steven Weinberg is an intellectual titan. Unfortunately, that really doesn't make him more qualified than anyone else to judge the merits of manned space flight. Space exploration isn't about validating theories on "unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles". I find it ludicrous that anyone would try to argue the merits of manned space flight solely in terms of economics and scientific data points. It's about frontiers and going beyond them. It's what we do.
On another note, my favorite line in the article is this:
"Most of the huge bills for these manned missions would come due after the President leaves office in 2005 or 2009, and the extra costs before then could be covered in part by cutting other things that no one in the White House is interested in anyway, like research on black holes and cosmology."
Spoken like a true theoretical physicist.
"Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair." A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick
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.
The point is NOT that Manned space flight is more cost-efficient. The point can be summed up in one statement:
"No Buck Rogers, No bucks."
Support for robotic exploration is limited. Can you say "JIMO" (Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter)? Or Kuiper Express?
Even with the the success of Spirit/Opportunity, these valuable missions are endangered. (Kuiper is all but dead - it's on hold and the probablity of restart prior to a rapidly approaching launch window are slim to none. JIMO on life support and anti-nuclear Hysterics are yanking on the respirator plug.)
Only the presence of humans has the possibility of of sparking the imagination. No child dreams of growing up to be "Spirit." Plenty dream of being an astronaut.
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
There will never be a time when moving mass quantities of people makes sense. The economics are that flying you to another planet will cost more than the total amount of useful work that you do in your lifetime, even if you didn't spend time on /.
Sending DNA is the only likely method of colonizing extrasolar planets. No giant colony ships, no band of hardy explorers in "hypersleep".
Besides, AI is just around the corner. I read about in Popular Science in 1975.
His proposal increases NASA's budget by a miniscule amount. He talk big, but it is all rhetoric.
Don't forget, it is an election year. This is just his ploy to get on the side of the scientific community.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
Untrue. Roughly one third of NASAs budget (5 billion of 15 billion) is devoted to manned space flight.
Quote: After the former President Bush announced a similar initiative in 1989, NASA estimated that the cost of sending astronauts to the moon and Mars would be either $471 billion or $541 billion in 1991 dollars, depending on the method of calculation. This is roughly $900 billion in today's dollars. Whatever cost may be estimated by NASA for the new initiative, we can expect cost overruns like those that have often accompanied big NASA programs. (In 1984 NASA estimated that it would cost $8 billion to put the International Space Station in place, not counting the cost of using it. I have seen figures for its cost so far ranging from $25 billion to $60 billion, and the station is far from finished.) Let's not haggle over a hundred billion dollars more or less--I'll estimate that the President's new initiative will cost nearly a trillion dollars.
This old figure has been comprehensively debunked. The 1989 initiative was used as a dream sheet for every blue-sky project in NASA over the next twenty years, with no attempt at reducing costs anywhere and then inflated by 50% anyway. Taking that figure, adjusting for inflation (approx. 1.6 multiplier, giving 750-865 billion), taking the higher figure, rounding it up and then adding 100 billion on top anyway does not seem to be an unbiased type of approach. Another way to put it would be that every blue sky project that NASA had in 1989, less the deliberate 50% addition and extra roundings up, would be 314-361 billion in 1989 dollars; 502-577 billion in todays dollars. For every blue sky project. Over 20 years.Quote:Compare this with the $820 million cost of recently sending the robots Spirit and Opportunity to Mars, roughly one thousandth the cost of the President's initiative.
And roughly one-thousandth the utility of a manned mission (for a summary of the humans versus robots debate please see robots versus humans Not to mention that the program of Lunar Base plus Manned Mars program will be unlikely to be anywhere near one thousand times the price of Spirit and Opportunity.
Quote: It had been hoped that the shuttle, because reusable, would reduce the cost of putting satellites in orbit. Instead, while it costs about $3,000 a pound to use unmanned rockets to put satellites in orbit, the cost of doing this with the shuttle is about $10,000 a pound. The physicist Robert Park has pointed out that at this rate, even if lead could be turned into gold in orbit, it would not pay to send it up on the shuttle.
Indeed, the shuttle is the least cost effective vehicle for space travel. Unlike, for example, Soyuz. I also agree that manning the launch of payloads that can be unmanned is not at all essential.
(Skimming through, because I have to get back to work)... Quote: 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.
Which implies that no other Apollos were specifically dedicated to scientific research. Apollos 15, 16 and 17 were dedicated to scientific research; when NASA had to cancel two landings originally, it cancelled the original Apollo 15 (which wasn't dedicated to scientific research) and Apollo 20. 18 and 19 were chopped later, after the "J-series" missions (scientific research) were in full swing. No other missions could be cancelled.
Oops, gotta go. Boss is coming ...
Well actually they risk no human lives and gain a hell of a lot of valuable information, just as we're doing with the Mars rovers.
But you are right! To hell with logic! I want expensive, low producing, dangerous manned missions so we can have courageous heros!
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I certainly hope that his Physics research isn't as sloppy as the google news search that he ran as the basis of this article.
For one thing, the $1 trillion figure cited is an widely acknowledged misquote made (and retracted) by an AP reporter. Ten minutes of fact-checking would have revealed that.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Oh, but you don't understand.....
Among geniuses he's a dimwit; but among dimwits he's a genius.
Incidentally, I might disagree with his opinion in the editorial, but he's certainly a very smart man. However, I find his editorial a bit disappointing. To give you an idea of where I come from, I enjoy physics and I find the mathematical problems of physics interesting, but I could care less about looking through a telescope. With that said, I still see good reasons for a manned mission to Mars.
The line between science and engineering is thin. By definition, engineering is science applied to problems. When most of the great physicists of the early 20th century assembled in the desert in New Mexico to build the atom bomb, they were focused on a deep problem in applied science. The technology of nuclear weapons isn't so advanced. It's the engineering details that have prohibited nuclear proliferation. When the United States entered the space race, the same gathering of minds occurred. If we would attack cancer and/or genomics with the same collective vigour we might actually see some results. Man needs goals to succeed. Clearly, climbing Mt. Everest isn't the feat it once was. It's the mental challenge that often stands in the way.
Man exceeds previous barriers by setting outlandish goals and engaging in the development of new tools. The field of mathematics has embraced the computer. Not just as a calculation, but we've started to embrace the program as math (see Church's Thesis, Kolmogorov Complexity, Algorithm Analysis, and ultimately P?=NP). Having embraced the program as math, we are able to model mathematical phenomena once thought intractable. The fields of in silico biology, computational physics, and computational neuroscience have emerged.
I believe the quest of a manned mission to Mars might bring the discovery of new propulsion systems. Imagine efficient solar powered engines or advances in a new science of terraforming (advanced environmental|chemical engineering). Could man eventually grow his own ecology? While this experiment may prove fatal on Earth. In a closed environment in space, such experiments might be possible. We may destroy the Earth via global warming, NBC warfare, or other acts of stupidity long before our sun goes nova. Could we someday repair the earth if necessary? Could we sustain life elsewhere?
Of course there is the insatiable curiosity that is science. Is there other life out there? What's the point of it all? Why do we exist? America has been defined by our rugged pioneers. "Go west young man!" This line fueled an age of unprecedented American expansion. Fortunes where sought rustling cattle in the mid-west and mining for gold on the coast. Would the United States be the same if it where not for Lewis and Clark?
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Ok, lets turn this around. That $1 trillion will cost the average US tax payer about $10,000 over the next 40 years (numbers here, do the math yourself), that breaks down into about $250 a year. Is it worth $250 every year for the next 40 to put a person on Mars (of course, this wouldn't affect people below the poverty line who don't pay taxes)? In Sally Struthers terms, is it worth $0.68 a day? If we give $1 trillion to NASA and set them the goal of landing a man on Mars, will they accomplish it? (I'm biased, so I suggest you look at the long list of successes of NASA before you answer.)
I won't even argue whether we should send people (in favor of probes) since this is really about the spirit of exploration and expanding the scope of human experience. Unfortunately those are entirely subjective, but let's strike a bargain. I'll support and pay for your social programs (because I think they are a waste of time) and you support my silly little space program. Do we have a deal?
The meek shall inherit the earth, in 3 by 6 plots. - Lazerus Long
The whole argument misses the point. The point is not to get humans into space to perform scientific experiments. It's the other way around. The science is there to get humans into space.
I'm not saying that the time is ripe to start thinking about building bases on the Moon, or to travel to Mars. I don't know whether that's reasonable at this point in time. What I do know is that it makes absolutely no sense to portray human space travel as some kind of irresponsible folly, and the science as some dignified Cause. They're both human fancies, and as with all fancies, the only question is whether we can afford it or not.
You seem to forget that spending money on space issues means that money is going to end op somewhere. Most of the times in companies. And in these companies work employees. So increased spending of money most of the time also means an increase in the number of jobs ... (which also means more revenues from taxes ..)
...I have taken the President's space initiative seriously. That may be a mistake.
There is absolutely no guarantee that, after scrapping the space-shuttle and the ISS, the current Vision will be fullfilled in a trip to Mars. As Mr. Weinberg sourly, and accurately, points out, the vast majority of the Mars exploration plan will be done after Bush's maximum term as president. There is a difficulty in saying what Bush's motives are regarding the space program. If he wants to scrap space exploration altogether, if he just wants to stop the hemorage that is the space-shuttle and the ISS, or if he really, truly hopes to get to Mars the first step is exactly the same for all three goals--kill the space-shuttle and the ISS.
Politically, the only option that makes any sense is to propose a better vision than the current one. No one wants to be a spoiler, so Bush had to come up with a compelling reason to kill those two programs. "They're just a waste of money" might be true, but if he doesn't have a good replacement for the space program, he's going to look like he doesn't have any Vision.
Regardless, it's a good thing the space-shuttle and ISS are getting phased out. In reality, it may not matter what Bush's Vision is, since he'll be gone before we get to Mars.
That dose of reality aside, here's to hoping that Bush figures out a way to make Americans On Mars as difficult to stop politically as the space-shuttle turned out to be.
I can't resist pointing out that even your insanely optimistic guess -- that a human can do in a week, or even a day, what it takes Spirit and Opportunity 80 days to do -- means that a human is only 10 to 80 times more productive than a robot.
Now, pay close attention to the difference between $820 million and $900 billion. That's the difference between the (known) cost of two unmanned Mars missions and the (estimated) cost of Bush's manned one. It implies that, to get a better "ROI" from manned flight, your Young Pioneers with their rock hammers and their can-do attitudes will have to be one thousand times more productive than robots, which
I wish you luck.
No. Scratch that. If you were proposing to use your money instead of my tax dollars, I would wish you luck. As it is, I wish you would go back to watching Star Trek.
(I'm really angry about losing the Hubble.)
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.
In the same way, human astronauts capture the imagination of people in a way that robots never can and never will. If not for John Kennedy's great vision of putting a man on the moon, we might not have the mighty space program we do today.
Take the humans out of it and the regular people will pay less attention to it, and be more likely to cut the funding altogether. You may not like this fact, but it's how people work.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
If the eary explorers had taken the same route we had, it would have been hundreds if not thousands more years before the early 'explorers' laid out their shipping routes. I doubt if Christopher Columbus had a detailed business plan showing return on investment before he went and ask for his backing. He had a idea, which is of far more importance.
... time to find someplace else to exploit. This little planet is starting to wear out.
What was important is not what they wanted to do, but what they did and 'discovered'. (I have put discovered and explorers in quotes, since many of the explorers where looking for fortunes and how do you discover lands where people already exist, but those are other arguements.)
Why should we go to Mars? For the same reason that we used to climb mountains, because no one has done it before and we have no idea what will be found there or what will come of it. Climbing Mount Everest used to be only for the few, now almost anyone in reasonable health and a good bank account can scale it. The mountain hasn't changed, only our knowledge of how to deal with it.
Our largest problem with space travel is making it safe. The US has become a country without risk takers (except on the freeways), people who are willing to put their life on the line just because. Even those souls that take around the world trips in ballons or wicker boats have armadas of support groups in case something happens.
I say balls to the wall....build something that has a 50-50 chance of making it back and fire it off. If it gets there and back, great. If not, we will probably learn a thousand times as much about what not to do the second time. Regardless, the people on the journey will be heroes and will be written up in countless of school books, especially if they are from several different countries.
Why go there?? Why not...it is the closest thing we have to spreading out species off this planet onto something that is marginally friendly. It will probably cost less to house people on Mars than on the Moon in terms of obtaining resources and creating an safe environment.
Yep
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
The truth is, robotic spaceflight IS NO LESS EXPENSIVE than human spaceflight, when you compare apples to apples. Weinberg claims the bulk of NASA's budget goes to human spaceflight, but that is false - roughly half of the space money in the NASA budget over the past couple of decades has gone to robotic missions. Many of which have crashed, gone off course, or otherwise been greatly degraded (Galileo had a tiny fraction of its designed data rate, due to a simple jam in its main antenna). Hubble itself was launched with a fatal flaw that made it close to unusable at first.
The shuttle is obviously a big part of the perceived cost problem for human spaceflight. Reusability sounded like a great goal, but when you're launching 100 tons to orbit and bringing back 75 (or sometimes the whole 100) every time, there's obviously a lot of waste. If you counted orbiter mass along with payload, the shuttle actually gets things to orbit for about $2500/pound...
But if the issue is just getting humans to orbit, we know how to do that as cheaply as robots, too. Soyuz can launch the same number of people for a tenth of the cost of the shuttle. In reality, all those big "requirements" for human spaceflight (air, food, temperature control etc.) are minor add-ons compared to the sophisticated controls an automated robotic system requires. Just look at the DARPA grand challenge for an example of how difficult it is for robots to do things humans can do naturally...
Anyway, enough ranting - Weinberg hasn't done anything original here, he's just echoing other people's arguments, badly.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Manned exploration may be expensive and hazardous, but every manned mission helps lay a small amount of groundwork for our eventual future of living and working in space. We need a "backup homeworld" to save our species from annihilation by natural or manmade disaster. Having colonies on Mars, the Moon, Lagrange points and beyond would serve the purpose very nicely.
I think we could eliminate most extraneous posts if we adopted a new /. motto...a quote by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynahan:
/.'ers would love to see us go to MARS...but it just burns our asses that it was taken to this level by the Bush Administration. I hear ya...but it just ain't intellectually honest to let political ideology and partisanship color the discussion. I know politics is a large part of "space exploration"...but we can't start an honest evaluation of things this way.
"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts."
As far as this topic is concerned, I think Keith Cowing of NASAWATCH & SpaceRef says it well in his "editor's note" about this op-ed piece.
(I would post it...but alas, it is copyrighted material - but you can still check it out on the main page of www.nasawatch.com )
Anyway, I love a high level of debate, but hope to have it with more accurate facts and critical thinking. I think most
Just my thought.
If you wait to have children until you have "enough" money, you're going to die childless.
:(
How different is this, on a "humanity" scale?
Aren't MOST of you sick at the short-sightedness of the institutions you deal with?:
Government (in the US, anyway) hardly every thinks beyond the next election, unless they are postulating huge costs or huge revenues for political purposes, then they'll make meaningless extrapolations like hell until the number is impressive enough.
Business hardly ever even looks beyond the next YEAR. Most business will happily cannibalize their future for some immediate revenues NOW, much less invest dollars that won't return during the tenure of the current CEO.
I may be a total Pollyanna, but Space Exploration has a (truly) mathematically INFINITE potential.
Granted, the return on investment may be on a term of decades or even centuries, but fer chrissake if even the technophiles are crying about running a balance sheet into the red for spaceflight, well then that bodes a pretty damn dismal future.
-Styopa
103 = 20%, then 515 = 100%.
So we need 5 times as many reactors. Hmmm.....
So to power the ENTIRE WORLD, we need:
441 = 16%, 2756.25 = 100%. I don't know where we'll put 1/4 of a reactor, but hmmmm...
and
Above is from the Pro-Uranium website.
Given that there are about 196,935,000 sq miles on the Earth's crust, and it is something like 5 miles deep, we have something around 2000 cubic miles of Uranium available. Some just may be hard to access.
Nukes for everyone!
Fellowship 9/11
"Compare this with the $820 million cost of recently sending the robots Spirit and Opportunity to Mars, roughly one thousandth the cost of the President's initiative."
Yes, and those rovers have moved, what, a few hundred meters, crawling along (literally) at the speed of a snail? I mean, it took days for Spirit to *turn around and use the other ramp.*
Humans need to be sent because, for the forseeable future, we have immeasurably greater versatility than any robotic probe. A *child* could have either turned Spirit around in seconds, or drove over the parachute and unstuck it from the wheels if anything went wrong. The Apollo astronauts covered more distance in a combined few days on the moon's surface in their buggies than all the probes we've sent to mars can ever hope to.
The point is that, until robots are capable or driving themselves, they will need to be remote-controlled. And the only other body where you could drive a probe remotely at a meaningful speed is the Moon. Mars is taking robotic RC to the limit, crawling along at 16mm per second so that Mission Control can react in time to prevent the probes from crashing into something. Until robots are 100% autonomous and can think for themselves, they need humans there to provide that function for them.
Because space exploration is one of the few human endevours that can unite everyone.
My most vivid memory from childhoon is the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger. As a fourth grader, I had ditched English class and snuck into a a science class that was watching it live. On the other hand, one of my father's greatest memories is that of his entire small township gathered around the television in the local high school watching Neil Armstrong live on the surface of the moon. I wish I had the opportunity to partake in that feeling, instead of the tragedy which befell Challenger.
I think it is a noble goal to give this generation the same opportunity to experience the joy and pride America felt when Armstrong descended to the moon, and a manned mission to Mars is the means to do just that.