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Scientists Say Goodbye to Philae Comet Lander (cnn.com)
Today, scientists from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) announced that they are saying goodbye to Philae, the comet lander that is currently perched on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it races toward the sun. According to Stephan Ulamec, Philae's project manager, "Unfortunately, the probability of Philae re-establishing contact with our team at the DLR Lander Control Center is almost zero." Philae first made history when it successfully landed on a comet in fall of 2014, but problems soon began when commands were not able to reach the robot.
Perhaps. Unlikely that anything needed for rendezvous with a comet would have commercial spin-offs, but there may be some materials improvements that trickle down.
Sure, that's a great thing - knowledge is good, and if this is purely in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, I'd be okay with that too.
Now you're just being stupid. Is the human race going to live on comets when we get "off this rock"? Orbital mechanics are well understood at this point, so rendezvous with an object traveling through space isn't really advancing the knowledge of the human race. Barring a fundamental revolution in our understanding and knowledge of physics, there is no practical way we're ever going to cut the cord between Earth and even the remotest colonies in the solar system. As earth lives and dies, so die our colonies inside the solar system. And fundamentally, there's NO way we're sending a manned mission to another star unless:
1) We have a revolution in physics that allows us to travel near or even above the speed of light, which landing a probe on a comet certainly isn't going to bring us closer to.
2) We have a massive revolution in our mastery of biological systems and engineering, allowing us to build fault-tolerant systems capable of preserving life across many multiples of the duration of recorded human history, in what essentially amounts to a giant tin can floating through interstellar space, surrounded by hard vacuum. Again, landing a probe on a comet isn't going to bring us closer to that.
We're stuck on this rock for the foreseeable future, champ. Learn to love it.
We're stuck on this rock for the foreseeable future, champ. Learn to love it.
We will be stuck on this rock forever, if you get your way.
There are certain things about space and space travel that you only can find out by doing it.
Learning about comets gives us the ability to see what sort of material makes up a solar system and how it interacts. We're not just doing this to go sightseeing.
There is some idea that we will somehow be able to magically be able to find all of those advances we need later if we just stay on Earth and focus no effort or money on space exploration. That makes zero sense.
We can still focus on space exploration while feeding the hungry. As I've pointed out more than once, we already *can* feed the world's population. What keeps us from doing it is actually mostly politics, which fouls up the logistics of actually doing it. We're not actually threatened with extinction and mass starvation simply because we won't add 19 billion dollars or so to our 4-6 trillion dollar budgets.
You realize the internet that you're using to complain about government spending on started off as a government project right?
At some point in the future we're going to be acquiring large quantities of resources from off-planet and this is another step in that direction. Really, anything that eventually helps humanity move out among the stars is far more important to us than anything we locally do on Earth. We might make life more comfortable for a few, but eventually something disastrous will happen to our planet (some people are even pretty sure we'll be the ones that do it) and we'll need to have a backup. Colonizing other planets and eventually other solar systems (or just being able to survive out in space for extended periods) is incredibly important.