Slashdot Mirror
Going Back to the Moon and Mars
An anonymous reader writes "An interesting three-part interview with author Dr. Andrew Chaikin discusses whether humans or machines could best explore the moon or Mars and even whether a crew could get along with each other for three years on an extended mission. His Mars planning draws on Apollo mission transcripts, and he cites mishaps with the Apollo 15 lunar rover almost sliding catastrophically down a mountain, an astronaut argument as to who took the most famous earthrise picture and what after 14 months in space, the Russian record-holder uses to recover his land legs: 'One vodka, one sauna'."
We're stayin we're goin' make up your mind... I vote we all stay and die.
Bringing humans into space is just PR, humans are fragile, require massive resources (living quarters, food, oxygen, water etc), and are error-prone. Humans in space is just pure national-ego and PR.
:)
Of course remote-controlling stuff is very slow, but it still requires less resources and time than to put actual people into space.
I think our best bet at exploring other planets "from the ground" is still machines, even more so if we can improve their AI:s and self-sustainability and adaptability in different conditions.
But then again, who wouldnt love going into space anyway?
You make it a REALITY SERIES.
"Three astronauts, picked to live in a spaceship and have their mission taped to find out what happens when people take a trip to Mars and start being real. The Real Mars."
If it takes 3 years, great! Imagine the ratings for each episode as they get closer to Mars, and the ratings for the finale? WOW!
ABC/Disney needs something big to combat Survivor and the Apprentice. I believe this is it.
It seems we could solve two problems here. Since food for a bunch of astronauts is a problem on a three year mission, basically include enough for all but one, and at some point in the mission plan on the majority voting for one fellow astronaut who gets eaten, solving food problems and getting rid of the most annoying astronaut in one fell swoop! Film it for transmission back to earth and you could get TV funding too.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
To anyone with any authority in the Federal government in general and/or NASA in specific (which means probably not SlashDotters, but hey, a geek can dream...):
1) Stop debating it. Stop doing cost-benefit analysis. I DON'T CARE IF WE DO LOSE A FEW LIVES. We NEED to proceed in our exploration of space.
2) Those who would be at risk to have their lives lost (read: astronauts) are willing to die in the line of duty anyhow, so who the hell are you to care?
3) We made it to the moon in fucking 1969. It's 2004 now, and we're still fucking around in orbit. In fact, we're barely doing that, and we're chicken-shitting out at every possible opportunity. (e.g. <voice timbre="Principal McVicker">Ohh, oh noo, we can't go back to fix Hubble again, someone might d-d-die...uhhhhh....<voice>) Where the fuck did we go wrong? Was this whole "space exploration" thing just the World's Biggest PR Stunt To Piss Off The Commies?
4) A decent space station is the first logical way station in our long-term trip to the stars. Stop slicing the budget of ISS. Actually, better yet, completely forget about ISS (after taking the guys there down...) and build a space station that doesn't suck, and that we won't do a half-assed job on completing. Mir, and the older Russian stations, and especially the American Skylab, were much more impressive in their day than ISS. This is fucking ridiculous. Our computers are 10,000 times faster than when we first went to the moon, and our space station technology is practically back-pedalling?
5) A moon base (yes, a permanent manned structure on the moon) is the second logical way station. We were supposed to have a moon base by the 1990s, right? That's what America was promised in the 1960s...right?
6) Only far-fringe lunatics care if you use nuclear bombs in space as a way to propel space vehicles (read: not as a weapon). Speaking as a very liberal child of hippies, I say: Use them. Use the bombs! If it's the quickest way to make a spacecraft that can travel at appreciable fractions of c, go for it! (Use them together; use them in peace...)
7) Even if we haven't completed (5) or (6): MANNED MISSION TO MARS. FUCKING NOW. IT'S 2004. WE'VE BEEN WAITING SINCE 1969.
8) WHY do we need to continue to explore space? Eventually, we'll lose Earth. Either we'll blow it up (highly likely), we'll wreck its climate (highly likely in the short-to-mid-term future), or an asteroid will hit it (unlikely in the near-term future but virtually ineviable in the long-term future). We have all of our eggs in one basket, and evidently we don't give a damn. What use is your short-term, corporate-style thinking if we're all going to die eventually? Take a lesson from the Japanese and start thinking long-term. Japanese firms regularly embark on projects that won't be finished until all of the founders are dead. They think long-term. America should emulate Japan in that respect.
9) (OT) Do not let Hubble die!!!
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
The primary goal at this point regarding manned spaceflight should be developing new better safer more efficient ways of getting into orbit, rather than blow massive resources on something with little payoff. We will never be able to colonize space with out a major advancement in this area.
mishaps with the Apollo 15 lunar rover almost sliding catastrophically down a mountain
That's okay. I saw an AAA bumper sticker in one closeup.
Table-ized A.I.
I suggest that the pool of astronauts considered for a trip to Mars be limited to those who have successfully parented difficult children. It is an experience that teaches one incredible patience in working out solutions when one's emotional forebearance is stretched beyond what one would consider possible. This common shared experience of such a team would provide a bond that would likely transcend the difficulties of the mission. Additionally, such candidates would be very happy to get off this planet.
I'm glad we didn't have governments a million years ago, we'd all still be up in a tree in Africa somewhere deciding whether or not it was safe enough, or practical enough to go down to the ground.
Down modding? I say publish the trolls name and address here.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space."
--Douglas Noel Adams
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I'm wondering what personal pet project of his Dr Chaikin would rather see the money saved from not sending humans into space go towards.
;)
Are we really content to just sit here on Earth and send machines off to see the rest of the universe? Are we content to say, "Well, yeah, we could've gone to Mars, but it wasn't safe"?
I think the answer to anyone who says we should stop sending people into space should be, "Well, when people stop wanting to go, we'll stop sending them." I mean, I'd be the first one to volunteer to go to Mars.
When it comes to actually landing on a planet and having a look around, a human (equipped with the necessary scientific instruments) could do a much better job than a robotic probe. The Spirit rover spent, what, a week just sitting there after landing because the JPL guys had to decide the best way to get it off the landing pad without it getting stuck? A human on Mars would have no such trouble.
And, of course, having humans on Mars would settle once and for all whether or not NASA's coloration of the Mars Rover images was accurate or not
I remember reading that at the Chernobyl accident, the doctors gave the reactor workers vodka for its "anti-radiation" properties.
If the cosmonaut's quote is any indication, Soviet space medicine has advanced beyond Soviet nuclear medicine, if only by the addition of the sauna.
We're talking about a country here that spends "billions" every year working out better ways to kill people. Personally I think space exploration would be a much better way to spend this money.
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
Of course, those were the plans. Plans and reality do have a way of disagreeing.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
what does the investment net us
Hope.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Crossing the ocean and crossing the cosmos are not the same thing. Scale matters in science. Added to which the sea can actually keep you alive if you use it wisely - the dangers of transoceanic journeys hence do not compare with interstellar travel.
Sure, humans are expensive and fragile. And sure, robots are improving, are cheaper, able to go p[laces humans can't, and they're of course expendible. But humans are much more adaptible and flexible, they can improvise, and they can think for themselves. Robots are DUMB. Take Mars as an example: cool as the robots are, they are lucky if they can move 100 meters in a day. And that's assuming they don't get confused by loose ground. Or have a flash formatting problem and just sit there for weeks...
But above all, humans are essential not so much because of what they can do as because what they represent: the future. The whole idea of space exploration is that ultimately we want humanity to settle the stars. Not to relieve population pressure, and not because we want our vacations on Mars. But because that is what life itself does. In the end, if space exploration is just a question of going a few places, taking some pictures, and maybe doing some science, then sooner or later it will die out. People won't keep spending $G for blue-sky science indefitiely. If you don't believe me, ask a particle physicist how much public support they're getting these days. However, people do largely understand at a deep level that space is about the next frontier, and that is why NASA enjoys even the level of support it does.
My colleages (I'm a scientist) have a tendency to forget the human side of the equation. They get carried away by their science (that what it takes to BE a scientist), and forget just how reliant they are on public support. It's easy to think "imagine what we could do if we spent 5 $G on robots", when the truth is that there would never be the same level of resources available for robots. And for good reason - if space exploration is merely a science, then it should compete on a level playing field with other, equally important sciences, like biology. Or particle theory. Or agricultural sciences, or medicine. Or mathematics. But of course, NASA gets a disproportionately large share of the "science" budget.
That being said, I think that NASA's human spaceflight is a total clusterfsck. They need to actually accomplish something! Even something simple like figuring out how to -- or if it's possible -- to avoide bone loss in long-duration spaceflight.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Actually that was a slight miss-translation, he asked for a suana full of vodka.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
I think one of the false dichotomies that winds up being used is: if you're in favor of space exploration, then you must support NASA and everything it does.
The problem is, I look at NASA's human spaceflight "program" and see failure. They have not built successively better capabilities towards a goal. In fact, it's hard to state with any seriousness that there has been a goal. "Permanent manned presense in space" is not a goal, it's... not even a tactic. What is it? I don't really see a whole lot of "the vision thing" in the current Moon-Mars proposal. Is there a goal? Why will the next 10-20 Congresses continue funding it, if there is not a tangible benefit?
Contrast this with the JPL-led Mars exploration program. Unlike the manned "program", JPL really does have a program worthy of the name. They keep building on past successes. They exploit current assets to increase capability and reduce cost and risk (e.g. they use orbiting probes to relay telemetry from landers, just one example). Each time they go, they don't throw away what they learned last time.
It's really hard for me to see how NASA will succeed in going to the Moon when they can't even find a way to take the risks needed to service Hubble. There has been a loss of technical competence, programmatic vision, and boldness (appropriately tempered by realistic assessment) that makes it hard to see this succeeding.
But blah blah blah... why do I bother writing these things. No one pays any attention anyway.
Scrap iron is, what, ten cents a pound? Iron cannot be mined economically in space with anything resembling current technology, by many orders of magnitude. Ditto for nickel. The platinum group elements in asteroids are not nearly as ludicrous, but are still out of reach.
BTW, we'd mine metallic NEOs (near earth objects) before going to the asteroid belt. Easier to get to and much easier to return mass from. Still not economical, though.
Arguing about whether humans or machines do science in space better is missing the point.
Human space travel is just that: h-u-m-a-n space travel. It's about going from Here to There.
Space travel offers a wonderful venue to pursue science. Likewise, much science needs to be done to support human space travel. But those are secondary motivations.
We didn't populate the Earth because we wanted to "do" science. Ditto the rest of the place.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The Solar System contains virtually unlimited resources in terms of energy materials with respect to the human population.
Why aren't people arguing about the best way to exploit these resources?
If America is going to be a dominant technological power with jobs for science and technology graduates, we have to make new science and new technology. This means somebody has to pay for it... and that's us. This is where our public sector R&D needs to be going.
If we have a human industrial presence in space, the science will follow, and far more of it than anyone is discussing doing today, either robotically or using human explorers. If a university can get a research project done by sending a grad student to a space station or moonbase lab via commercial space flight, its going to be a lot cheaper to do this than to build a satellite payload and find a launch platform. Plus, if something unexpected happens, whether it's a design error or something interesting, it's a lot easier for a human to reconfigure his planning than to reconfigure the hardware configuration of a satellite already in orbit.
Low hanging fruit: A profitable space power satellite network is probably achievable using more or less current technology based on Russian satellite launch prices. However, the time to profit would be a lot shorter with a Space Elevator or earth-to-orbit railgun as a launch platform.
For more information, check the link in my sig.
Tech Public Policy stuff
...going back to the moon?
What's that?
Oh no!
It's Buzz Aldrin!
He's gonna punch me!
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
There are two ideas here that are seemingly in conflict. Firstly that robots are cheaper and easier to get 'out there'. Secondly that humans need to get off this planet because we need multiple home worlds for reasons of risk-abatement.
I agree with both of those views because they only conflict in the immediate short term.
If you want to get people to Mars in large enough quantities to be meaningful, then you need to do the science on the planet first. If robots can achieve that Mars mission more effectively - then in the short term we should use robots in order to hasten the time when understand enough about the planet to go and live there.
In the very long term, I predict we'll have either machines which are truely as intelligent as us - or a way to put our own thoughts and emotions into robotic bodies (after one generation, it matters very little which of those it is). Either way, sending them to colonise Mars will be just as valid as sending our 'bags of mostly water'. Beings whose thoughts are essentially just software can travel at low cost and at the speed of light with no inconveniences of any kind.
www.sjbaker.org
of course someone at the peak of physical fitness is going to go bonkers spending three years in a cubicl^h^h^h^h^h spacecraft with no place to go outside.. there are people who spend months playing with computers, who hate going outside, and don't have the energy to move around much.. send the video gamers, no to lan gamers, they like to get out too much
send my wife, who spends entire days playing diablo with her perfect IK set, doing deliberate incomplete baal hell runs with 3-7 other people that would make me cry, and I can't stand to watch, she'll do it for 8 hours in a row... these are the people who can make the journey..
course, they're useless when you get there....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It's really hard to have a meaningful conversation about future space exploration, when the key participants have hidden agendas, political considerations, and egotistical motives. There are only a few significant issues that should color the choices we make;
1. Earth is a dangerous place, and the human race barely escaped extinction once already. We need to get life all over the place, and at the top of that list, human life. By spreading us all over, we preclude the largest list of possible extinction scenarios. That and the earth is only going to be a happy home for a finite time anyway... we should get our behinds out into the void and start having the kind of fun you can only get as a space faring race.
We must move into space... it is our destiny.
2. Making space habitable is very hard, and extremely expensive. We need to build smart machines that can build sustainable habitats on the moon, mars, a whole bunch of asteroids chock full of useful resources (including water), and the jovian moons. Once there are fully operational facillities in these places, supporting a growing and healthy population of people in space will be cake. The skyhook will reduce the cost of moving resources, and the development of smart self learning robots will have fantastic applications here on earth.
We must move into space... it is our destiny, but we should do so thoughfully, and make sure that each new foothold supports the next. We must avoid stupid and pointless excess for the sole purpose of flaunting our egos, or controling the masses.
3. Keep the military out of space, whatever you do. The only way we can afford to place weapons in space is if they're pointed away from the planet, designed to protect us from an external threat. Literally make them impossible to point at Earth. Any other scenario has one nation lording space based weapons over others and world politics dictate that this nation will be hated and despised. We want to protect ourselves from the small and fearful minds of angry men with little or no vision.
The short term benefit for humanity is; wealth of resources, new technology, protection from potential extinction. The medium term benefit is abundant new housing off planet for a burgeoning population to move... the human adventure of space pioneering. The long term benefit is that life from our world has been preserved, we are allowed to evolve fully into whatever we will become, and the planet is preserved so that it remains a garden, allowing new and interesting life to evolve, mayhaps even joining us as we travel into space.
In short, we must make our homes among the stars, and we need to do so, such that the entire race see's benefit, value, and is part of the process. If we can do this... our future will indeed be bright and boundless.
Genda
You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?" -- George Bernard Shaw
Scrap iron. 10 cents per pound. A pound of iron outside earth's gravity well, ready to be used for space explaration. Priceless!