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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."
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.
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.
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".
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
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 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 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...
Say what you want about him, but the man is a deadly serious True Believer. His belief is so strong and serious that even facts don't often get in the way.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
I recently read a column from the head of a research institute who said that they get often approached by space agencies asking if they would please give them some experiments to do in space, so they have a reason to go up there again. The columnist stated that doing stuff in space usually isn't science. The research questions postulated are mostly of the kind "How do these bacteria multiply... IN SPACE?", "How does this chemical reaction go... IN SPACE?" etc. That isn't science, it's just preliminary exploration: see if something interesting will happen if you do it... IN SPACE!
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?
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.
I dunno? What do you think Gilgamesh?
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
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.
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.
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 ...
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
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.
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.