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Commission Suggests UK Should End Astronaut Ban
An anonymous reader writes "According to the BBC a British scientific panel has recommended that the British Government should end its ban on human space flight. The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Commission pursued a 9-month investigation into 'The Scientific Case for Human Space Flight'. Professor Frank Close, Chair of the Commission, said, 'We commenced this study without preconceived views and with no formal connection to planetary exploration. Our personal backgrounds made us lean towards an initial skepticism on the scientific value of human involvement in such research.' The commission concluded that 'profound scientific questions relating to the history of the solar system and the existence of life beyond Earth can best - perhaps only - be achieved by human exploration on the Moon or Mars, supported by appropriate automated systems.'"
Isn't the real question - Why was it banned in the first place?
I mean, seriously. That's all I can say. What the fuck?
I mean shit, I know it's a waste of money but to BAN it? Someone needs to get beat with a billy club.
that the report comes out couple of days after the Chinese astronauts return to Planet Earth.
There is a limited supply of it. The question is, do you focus on the automated robotics or on the human missions?
A good example is that GWB is gearing NASA to spend heavily on the moon shot. So they just fired 300 top engineers at JPL. JPL has done a fair number of the automated systems. I would expect that the private enterprise will pick these ppl up. Most have a great deal of talent and interest.
The moon shot will costs more than a 100 billion dollars to get us back there. Hopefully this time, we do not dismantle such an expensive set-up.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This kind of reasoning makes me break out in hives. It's like saying the way to be an innovative company is to look at other innovative companies and copy what they do. Sometimes the thing to do when everyone is doing A is to find something the B that everybody else is not doing, where marginal returns are higher.
So, putting two and two together, this is political and diplomatic rather than scientific an technical. Which is not to say "not worthwhile", but justifications have to be found elsewhere. A couple of hundred million pounds a year is not going to get Britain its own space capability by a long shot, but it will allow it to play with other nations.
As a counter example,engineers on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission found their equipment could be kept functioning well past their orignial goals and decided to keep them doing science until they die. We won't be doing that with astronauts. It might be the next best step for marginal returns is a manned mission, but I doubt it. My point here is that we should not be overly concerned with the apparent flexibility of a mission component, which after all people would be, without taking into the account their impact on the overall flexibility of the mission and the program.
I wonder if some British national pride was hurt by the failure of the Beagle 2. That mission was way outside the box in terms of ambition for funding. It might have been a brilliant success. The lesson of the Beagle 2 mission should NOT be (in my opinion) that robotic missions are too risky. It should be that taking ambitious risks entails experiencing failure, otherwise it's neither ambitious or risky. Put in perspective, Britain could have launched twenty Beagle 2 missions (more if fixed costs are amortized) for the price of the dual Mars Exploration Rover mission; if it had a 10% chance of success they'd be in the same place in terms of mission success, but gained a great deal more technical expertise. Not only would this expertise enhance national prestige indirectly through increased capabilities, I believe that success after a number of failures would yield more prestige directly, ironic though that may be. It would remind people that you're trying something difficult and risky.
I'm not against manned space exploration; I'm for getting the most science out of our buck -- er -- pound. I'm not convinced that a manned mission is scientifically or technically the best marginal investment at this time. Even in terms of national prestige, I'm not convinced that manned missions are what they used to be. If the public wants to see George Clooney in a s
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Why the fuck are so many of your posts anti-British.
You've got a giant chip of your shoulder. What's a matter, denied citizenship?
For the last 10 years or more we've been saying there is "most likely" water in the form of ice at the poles. We have yet to land a probe, drill out a sample and test it. That'd be great science wouldn't it?
There is no doubt that there is interest building to due this soon. Is is great science? I'd say it is a second order result. It is already highly likely given all of the indirect evidence. I think your idea of finding high concentration metallic meteoric deposits is at least as interesting.
an ill wind that blows no good
The comparison with shuttle IS fair, because its 60 tons to orbit is not really useful payload. True, its a life support system, but its also a crew return mechanism with features that aren't useful at all in orbit. Why count the landing gear or wings of the shuttle as payload to orbit? The new strategy is to significantly reduce the mass of the return mechanism in exchange for payload that doesnt need to be returned to earth.
The side-mount launch configuration of the shuttle IS the least safe feature of the system. Columbia is a direct result of that configuration, and its debatable if Challenger would have resulted in a loss of crew if they were being launched on an in-line system.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
Basically, it's much cheaper to send up a new satellite than it is to send the shuttle up to fix them. Do we send a 250,000 pound shuttle into orbit or a 20 ton satellite?
It would have been cheaper to send up 3 Hubble replacements into orbit using the shuttle than it was to repair the old one. Just think of each of those missions as 1BILLION $ down the drain. OR we could have send ~6 Hubble's up in a non man launch vehicle.
Now sending people into zero G for months at a time has value, but there is little value in sending up a shuttle when what we really want to do is replace a few parts on a satellite. What would have been useful would be to develop a remote controlled repair robot that we could send into orbit with all the devices needed to fix these satellites. With a good design we could use some ION drives and get the thing to pick up the needed pieces to repair a satellite and then fly by and repair them. You might think people are going to be more dexterous than such a ship but in with the gloves these people uses they don't really have much manual dexterity.
Even if such a system where 1/2 the weight of the shuttle the extended stay in space coupled with a more efficient drive system would make for huge cost savings. Even if it took 5x as long to do a repair it would still be a lot cheaper than sending people to do such simple jobs. And if one of them blows up it might make page 6 news vs. setting back the space program several years.