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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.
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".
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.
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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
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!
Single Stage to orbit, airbreathing, lands and takes off like a conventional aeroplane. A snip at $10 billion (R&D- ticket price would be about a not-totally-unreasonable $100,000).
It doesn't seem to require any handwavium or unobtainium unlike (at the moment at least) the Space Elevator.
Incremental advances seem unlikely to do it - it requires an orders-of-magnitude shift in cost.
That may well happen though. Some new launchers like SpaceX promises to be quite a bit cheaper- a combination of higher launch volume and real reductions in price due to improved vehicle design very probably can drop us by that much.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
Weinberg's point is not that space flight is too expensive; his point is that manned space flight is too expensive and that the gains of sending a person along are marginal.
The figure that he cites it that it costs $3,000 per pound of payload for an unmanned rocket, and $10,000 per pound for the Space Shuttle.
Granted, the unmanned rocket is not cheap, but the manned flights cost more than three times as much.
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 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
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.)