Space Is Not a Void (slate.com)

An anonymous reader shares an article: When President Kennedy announced the Apollo Program, he famously argued that we should go to the moon because it is hard. Solving the technical challenges of space travel is a kind of civilizational achievement on its own, like resolving an interplanetary Rubik's Cube. The argument worked, perhaps all too well. As soon as we landed on the moon, humanity's expansion into the cosmos slowed and then stopped (not counting robots). If you were to draw a graph charting the farthest distance a human being has ever been from the surface of Earth, the peak was in 1970 with Apollo 13. With the successful moon landings, we solved all of the fundamental challenges involved in launching humans into orbit and bringing them back safely. The people watching those early feats of exploration imagined we would soon be sending astronauts to Mars and beyond, but something has held us back. Not know-how, or even money, but a certain lack of imagination. Getting to space isn't the hard part -- the hard part is figuring out why we're there. Sure, we can celebrate the human spirit and the first person to do this or that, but that kind of achievement never moves beyond the symbolic. It doesn't build industries, establish settlements and scientific research stations, or scale up solutions from expensive one-offs to mass production. Furthermore, as five decades of failing to go farther than our own moon have demonstrated, that kind of symbolism can't even sustain itself, much less energize new activity.

Comments

A lack of imagination?

[barakn]

Or is it that it's very expensive and extremely dangerous?

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eye problems, muscle tissue problems, bone marrow problems, radiation, the list goes on. There are many reasons why long distance space travel is not possible at this time. Sound like some Millennial at Slate decided to write a blog post out of complete ignorance for any of the science involved. Humans already figured out that long distance travel is not worth the cost to the health of the travelers at this time and therefore have focused on robots and satellites to do the exploration. A far better investment of tax payer money if you ask me. Leave suicidal trips to private adventurers.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Applehu Akbar]

These are all problems we have found in zero-G, which is what the ISS was designed to test. Now we can try simulating gravity to characterize how much gravitation is required to offset what medical effects.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Rick Schumann]

Yes, it's about the most expensive thing that our species has ever done. Even putting satellites into orbit is supremely expensive, not even counting the payload itself. If it's not cost-effective, if there's no profit to be made from putting humans on, say, Mars, then you're not going to get funding to do it, or private industry interested in doing it. The only way that happens is if there's actual profit to be made (literally, above and beyond the costs associated). So far, no dice. That, plus it'll take generations to even build a viable colony and industry on even our own Moon; I defy you to try to get the general public to stay interested in something like that for that long.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[swb]

Until not that long ago it was extremely dangerous and expensive to travel more than 100 miles from home and in many places it still is. With that kind of logic, humans would never have left their village let alone their continent.

Yet to this very day there are people who take incredibly perilous journeys willingly even though they know that where they are going life will (at least initially) be very hard and the environment will be hostile, perhaps even fatal.

I think the biggest value of the manned space program isn't the space travel, really, but the sense of inspiration it provides, the notion that humanity is actually going somewhere and somehow progressing in the process.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Sique]

It does not come from a lack of leadership. It really comes down to a big Why we should?

When people went to the Moon, we thought we would need people to set up experiments on other moons and planets. But since the mid-1970ies, automated space probes proved us wrong. They could get to Venus, Mercury and Mars at a fraction of the cost than having space ships going there. They could be smaller as they didn't need to house humans. They didn't need any life sustaining technology. They didn't need to come back. They could sustain accelerations in swing-by maneuvers no human would survive. And they had patience. They can fly three decades without going nuts. They could deliver the same measurements again and again with constant quality. And we could have them fly risky maneuvers because when they got lost, it was just damage to a machine.

There is not much scientific value in having humans flying to other space objects. And there is no business case yet. Thus we don't.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[bluefoxlucid]

1) You don't imagine any reason other than profit for going into space.

Well, yes.

Today, we work 40 hours per week. We get paid, and what do we do with the money? We buy things. We go into debt to buy, and then inflation makes our dollar-wages higher while not making our dollar-debt higher: it shrinks our debt back down. Corporations profit, banks profit, and we sort of fold some of the buying power back into worker hands.

When we improve technology, we make more for the hours we work. We still swap dollars at the exchange rate--I take home $20/hr, you cost payroll $10/hr, I work one hour to induce you to work two--and we get more for that time we put in getting those dollars.

Now imagine humans do a bunch of work and then burn the things they made.

We still work 40 hours, but a quarter of what we make gets tossed in the trash and incinerated for no purpose. Essentially, we work 40 hours and get paid for 30 hours. We're poorer.

That's what sending a bunch of crap into space for no reason does. That's what going to war does. That's what anything not really profitable does. Oh, sure, we can take a loss on paper doing drug research, and that might even be a loss for the world if the drug is useful for like 10 people a year but costs $3 billion to come up with; but we can also expend $100 million to, say, import a low-cost generic, research it, and FDA approve it, with no capacity to make a business profit. In both case, we as a society bear the cost; yet in the latter case, we get access to a low-cost drug like Bromantane, and can now treat depression (and maybe ADHD?) more-effectively with a $10/month prescription.

Profit isn't just a matter of a business surviving; it's a matter of society as a whole getting out more than it put in. Neither of these outcomes guarantees the other is also happening, and the latter one is the important one in long terms (thus why we have welfare).

What is that hard?

[SuperKendall]

the hard part is figuring out why we're there.

Good grief, why is that even a hard question? The answer is because it's not well explored, we as a civilization have always explored, and in the end have always ended up benefitting by doing so.

Untold riches await the explorer - either of the mind, or literal material riches.

The hard question is not figuring out why we are there, it's figuring out what the hell the delay is!

Re:What is that hard?

[higuita]

Stop funding weapons and wars and you will find that you have a lot more money available
Tax rich people, specially if they try to avoid taxes!! Close the tax heavens and financial loop holes.

Re:What is that hard?

[Rob Y.]

Of course, the New World was quite capable of sustaining life - and even had its own life forms to explore (and cultures to dominate).

What amazes me are the people that say we need to colonize other worlds for when we render this one uninhabitable. Well the worlds we could conceivably reach with our 'proven space travel technology' are far less inhabitable than this one will be - even after we're through with it. That doesn't mean we should stop looking for interesting targets and developing new technologies that may someday make practical space travel possible. But to argue that it's possible now - just because we know how to send a projectile with a short-term human-supportable environment to the moon - is absurd.

Re:What is that hard?

[jezwel]

America is rich beyond belief. The US government is not trying hard enough to get access to those funds. For some reason, spending vast sums on the MI complex propping up non-US territories for access to resources is seen as a better strategy than developing your own access to uncontested resources in space.

Why discount robots?

[grasshoppa]

The argument worked, perhaps all too well. As soon as we landed on the moon, humanity's expansion into the cosmos slowed and then stopped (not counting robots)

Why do our achievements with sending robots not count? We're still producing remarkable feats of science and engineering, aren't we? What's so important with sending flesh and blood?

Yes, other-world colonization is a very real goal, but it's not the only one. Scientific exploration is more efficient ( ie: get more done for less ) when you don't have to worry about maintaining a fragile human being as well.

We need to prepare now

[coldandcalculating]

I agree with the sentiment that we can't talk seriously about colonizing other worlds until we learn how to sustainably inhabit our own, but we need to develop the technology to move humans en masse alongside the capability to not ruin whatever place we land on. Not ruining planets is something we should be practicing on earth immediately, but as TFA points out, many people fail to recognize the economic benefits. Some day this world will be come uninhabitable (asteroid? zombies?) and it would be nice for the sake of our species to be able to move at least some of us to a new place and stay alive there. Why not work on this technology and prepare now? I think our descendants would thank us if they didn't have to attempt the long term survival of the human race in a hastily improvised tin can.

One of my favorite stories is Aesop's tale of the boar and the fox:

One day as he moved through the forest the fox came upon his friend the wild boar who was engaged vigorously sharpening his tusks against a large stone.

"My friend," started the fox, "Why do you exert yourself so, seeing there is no hunter about and no other danger from which to defend yourself on this day in the forest?"

To which the boar frankly replied, "The day will come when I have need of sharp tusks. I shall have no time to sharpen them then."

It's a lack of leadership

[cmaurand]

Not imagination. The moon program brought us solid state, microprocessors and miniaturization the went orders of magnitude better than anything previously produced, velcro, microwave ovens, fuel cells, ground reading radar, methods of inter-body navigation, Tang, Space docking procedures, standardized hatches on spacecraft, better alloys for building air and space craft, Meals Ready to Eat, air scrubbers, and more than anything else, confirmation of the math and physics involved. The space program generated all sorts of industries. In n1961, the technology for putting a person on the moon and returning them safely to the earth didn't exist. by 1969 it did. That took leadership. I haven't seen that kind of leadership since Kennedy. Lots of private contractors got very wealthy off the space program. However, NASA doesn't have the kind of lobbying money available to it that Goldman-Sachs has. What NASA does isn't sexy.

More complex than that

[AlanObject]

The only reason that the U.S.A. went to the moon is because the reactionary/conservative votes in Congress and their constituency tolerated it. The reason: they were afraid that the USSR would get there first and establish military dominance from space.

Even so, if JFK had not been assassinated I have read that many historians agree that most of the NASA programs and particularly Apollo would have been de-funded. It was only through sentimental appeal to preserving the JFK legacy that they managed to preserve the 1-2% of the federal budget used for that purpose.

Today, the political dynamic is far different. As long as the right-wing has control of government it will never fund NASA space exploration again. The most you can get is big sub-contracts for private enterprise like SpaceX. But you will have to notice that Elon Musk is no longer hanging out with Trump. What do you think that is?

To the GOP, government scientists are the enemy, as are scientists employed by anyone that they do not have direct control over.

The issue is not motivation or imagination. It is the very peculiar politics of the U.S for the past several decades.

What what?

[guruevi]

It doesn't build industries, establish settlements and scientific research stations, or scale up solutions from expensive one-offs to mass production.
NASA paid back at least 5:1 every investment ever made in it. Sure not so much today, but we wouldn't have the computer era without the space race, or memory foam mattresses or velcro or insulin pumps or LCD displays or photovoltaic cells.

Even if going to space is completely pointless (Beyond the information we get from doing basic research) it has encouraged the building of many industries. And even if it was just the information we gathered, it has helped endless amount of lives go from superstition based beliefs to actual scientific inquiry.

It's all about competition

[Parker Lewis]

The reason why USA planned a moon travel was not because "it's hard", it was because Russia sent a man to the space first. After the competition is over, all stopped. Maybe China sending man to the space/moon/Mars will make USA react again. Need or competition is the fuel for mankind.

Interestingly ...

[fahrbot-bot]

When President Kennedy announced the Apollo Program, he famously argued that we should go to the moon because it is hard.

This is very close to the pick-up line JFK used on Marilyn Monroe.

Space Has Been Quietly Developing

[DanielRavenNest]

In 1972, there were less than 200 active satellites in space ( https://media.tumblr.com/tumbl... ). Today that number is about 1500, and those satellites are larger and more capable. But communications, weather, navigation, and definitely military satellites don't make headlines. Missions with people, and "firsts", like flying past Pluto, do. That gives the public a skewed idea about space. All the people getting satellite TV and radio, GPS, and weather reports are benefiting from space, even if they don't realize it.

Even human missions don't make the news once they are routine. Three astronauts just came back from the Space Station. Did that make the news? Probably not.