A bit of a contrarian opinion. But nasa, whilst lauded for their achievements thus far. Due to the issues like:
- politics surrounding it
- regulations
- money dependent on jobs (think SLS program)
- ever changing goals (bush, obama, now trump)
Should now just be a research only facility and fully give the mechanics of space exploration to private facilities such as Space X, rockets and Bigelow for the habitats for example.
To clarify this more. Nasa should be given monies by the tax payer for various projects.
Invest in such projects that require 100 years to come to-fruition to projects that can be achieved within 10-25 years and absolutely no government interventions! Just leave them alone and let them to their glorious work.
They should be projects that the private sector can't invest in because it's too costly. That said however, they should also act in a VC capacity. That researcher that wrote a paper about newer modes of transport? Throw $10m at him, put a team around him consisting of nasa scientists and engineers and see what comes out of this. Do this for 10 or 100 ideas and we'll get a lot of inventions.
Finally for gods sake, the current budget is 0.49% of the total spend. Increase that to 5%. If all the current engineers dedicated to the failed SLS program and moon base machinations were reassigned on separate projects like :-
- vasmir ion engines
- portable space nuclear reactors
- simulating gravity without needing a spinning chassis
- solving the galaxic cosmic rays problem with space ships
These types of ultra long open-ended research projects with no driving commercial or defense need, or real-world short term deliverables are just the kind of project you can dump billions of dollars into and get roughly nothing back in return.
At the Starship even a couple weeks ago Elon quipped when it comes to schedules, "Long is wrong, tight is right." The point is that humans respond well to aggressive but achievable goals with big payoff in the short-term. It focuses the effort on what is actually needed to achieve mission success.
To put it more succinctly, necessity is the mother of innovation.
"We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win"
We needed to beat the russians to the moon, it was part of the cold war effort, as much as I agree with these ideals they need to be tempered in reality and politics. We have no comparable political need for space exploration today.
Unless you’re concerned about us as a species not making it out of the local minima of the comfort of earth before an extinction level event wipes us out.
Which, fair enough, most politicians aren’t.
We are so, so far away from being able to leave earth and terraform/colonize other planets. A better argument is that we might find new technology or make new observations that help raise the standard of living on earth through designing to the requirements of space survival and exploration. But it's hard to translate potential ROI into spending when there are much more pressing problems here on earth.
Not true. We've had sufficient technology for a long time. We've been sending robots to Mars for decades.
We just haven't made it an objective to terraform Mars. We've even been quite cautious about avoiding even the possibility of transporting microbes there and "contaminating" it.
But the basic mechanics of how to terraform are known. Elon Musk mentioned nuking the poles of Mars as an option. Changing the gas composition could be done, albeit slowly, with enough resources and motivation. You can send robots in advance of human settlers to prepare things.
Self-replicating robots would be more ideal, and that is not a solved problem, but you could likely build partially self-replicating robots that are replenished with "vitamins" much like how the RepRap project does.
Various NASA theorists have written about such things
Yes, and the equivalent of 175 billion dollars per year (4% of federal budget times 4.4T$/y). I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that the money may have helped, too.
That is not how inflationary comparisons work with government budgets. The entire documented cost of the Apollo program[1] was $25.4 billion over 11 years. Adjusted for 2018 dollars that's $153 billion over 11 years, which works out to just about $14 billion per year.
The total expenditure in the 2018 United States budget was $4.109 trillion[2] or %0.34 of yearly expenditures. Budgets do not follow inflationary trends even remotely, the 1961 expenditure[3] was $181.588 billion (wow that's pretty crazy). For the year that makes the Apollo program %1.2 of the federal expenditure.
Another useful point of reference, the entire NASA organization in 2018 had an operating budget of $19.2 billion and this has to cover all of the mandated projects such as the SLS. They're also responsible for maintaining and monitoring a lot of infrastructure for other agencies (the weather service, DSN, etc) which wasn't the case during the Apollo mission. NASA itself is kind of left with scraps.
Right, but normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget, which is not excellent for this purpose, as you point out.
In any case, thanks for digging up more numbers.
I stand by my claim that money (and enough assurance of continued money to bet everything on one large project) is key.
> normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget
No it's not. Maybe normalize to the median income if you don't like bread and milk, but how much the government spends on education, health care, interest, military fleets, farm subsidies... that's not relevant to NASA's budget.
> Right, but normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget, which is not excellent for this purpose, as you point out.
I agree. Give me one year for a software project, and I will procrastinate. Give me 4 months, and I will get my shit together, I will be frugal with my time and resources.
In the same fashion, I would get the same or MORE work done in less than an 8 hour work day, because I would just not have time to be on HackerNews.
Musk is the most powerful man in history. Everyone else with the ability to wipe out cities has had some form of government controlling their actions or relied on armies to do the deed, and they couldn't do it anonymously.
Well sure a couple F9's dropped on a city would cause some problems for sure. or maybe you are thinking launching a bunch of titanium rods and dropping them.
Sure he could definitely DO that, but I don't think he could do it anonymously.
Once Starship is up and running, his ability to cause destruction def. goes up, but he would have even less anonymity.
Fans (and I'm sure govts) closely monitor all of SpaceX launches/development/etc. Also, once you got a bunch of rods or rockets or whatever you were going to drop, they don't exactly hide in space, they are pretty easily tracked, and publicly tracked even.
Since they are backlogged with rocket orders, it would cost a LOT to do and lead to to economic decline, if not financial ruin of the SpaceX business.
So could he do it? sure, easily? Not really, but certainly WAY easier than Bezos or anyone else. But anonymously? I really doubt it. Plus who else even has the single handed capabilities? The US Air Force, Russia, India and China. That's pretty much it. Bezos maybe in a few years.
Elon Musk doesn't have the ability to wipe out cities anonymously.
Even if he had the ability to wipe out cities, which he doesn't, by definition being the only private citizen capable of doing so would make the suspect list pretty short.
>Should now just be a research only facility and fully give the mechanics of space exploration to private facilities such as Space X, rockets and Bigelow for the habitats for example.
That's exactly what NASA is and always has been. NASA does the research and development that is worthwhile but not sufficiently obvious/commercially viable for private industry to do themselves. Space was at one time categorically that. Now, LEO is largely a solved problem as far as launches go, which is precisely why SLS is focused on missions beyond Earth orbit. With the progress SpaceX is making, it's likely that SLS will be the last NASA rocket program.
> Just leave them alone and let them to their glorious work.
Believe it or not, this does largely happen on the micro scale.
He <<commissioned the grand reconstruction of Paris. He launched similar public works projects in Marseille, Lyon and other French cities. Napoleon III modernized the French banking system, greatly expanded and consolidated the French railway system and made the French merchant marine the second largest in the world. He promoted the building of the Suez Canal and established modern agriculture, which ended famines in France and made France an agricultural exporter. Napoleon III negotiated the 1860 Cobden–Chevalier free trade agreement with Britain and similar agreements with France's other European trading partners. Social reforms included giving French workers the right to strike and the right to organize. The first women students were admitted at the Sorbonne, and women's education greatly expanded as did the list of required subjects in public schools. >>
But then, he was Emperor of the French (the last one) and had absolute power... What you propose we do with NASA is something similar in long term vision, but then again, we live in a (?flawed) democracy where any long term investment is hotly contested and annihilated. I wish we could find a better way, a new age of enlightenment so we could finally do great things again.
The investment wouldn't be contested if it was fully funded immediately. But, if every year you need to decide what to do with newly collected revenue, what right do old generations have to lock new generations into paying for programs that they don't believe in?
>Finally for gods sake, the current budget is 0.49% of the total spend. Increase that to 5%
A couple years ago I wanted to just create a proper multi-national politics-free space organization (I know, it would never happen with the way things are).
At the time if we took 1% of the GDP (presumably via a tax) of the top 5 nations you would have created a 408 billion a year budget. Staffed by academics, create a board that has heads of industry, experts in various fields (various types of engineers, test pilot, medical doctor, etc) and scientists in relevant field and set a max term they can serve with the initial ones picked in varying intervals (3 year, 5 year, 7 years) so that you are only replacing a percentage of your people at any given time so you can stay more focused on long-term goals. Also try and keep relatively equal numbers of representatives from each financially contributing country on the board.
Also allow other countries to contribute 1% of their GDP unless they are an economically disadvantaged country then allow them to contribute at a much lower scale with scaled benefits.
As far as the 'benefits' allow every country contributing 1% of their GDP to have 100% royalty free access to any technologies/discoveries/data that is a result of this agency. Countries that were sliding-scale members, pay 1/10th of the royalty/fee that non-contributing companies would and still keep the non-contributing country fee relatively low (even 1% fee on something that might result in a profit of 100 million a year globally could extend a given mission a year or more).
It's a massively unrealistic dream but it's probably the closest we could get to something like Starfleet.
I don't want to "that guy" but my first instinct is to say this wouldn't happen not with the way things are now but with the way things are ever.
That's not really my root cause objection. It's the "politics free" part. It's not in my mind that that isn't achievable I have doubts as to wether it's desirable. Politics in my mind is about who or what gets hurt and who or what gets helped in any endevour.
Trying to get rid of politics seems to me like trying to get rid of pain. It's feedback. Try running any system without that - it won't work. I know a lot of the time the feedback is inaccurate but the fix is more inputs not less.
Politics and regulations and changing goals are still going to affect funding decisions, whether that funding goes to private or public organizations. Instead of deciding cut NASA's project XYZ funding this year, it would be a decision to cut WhateverCorp's project XYZ funding this year. Then there'd be a hugely expensive, bureaucratic, and likely corrupt bidding process. Think about the healthcare.gov debacle, with all the federal contractors involved.
There’s no such thing, I think this is in the genre of “I wish there was a solution to this problem, and I’m sure throwing billions of dollars at it will solve it, so let’s try and see what happens”.
You accelerate toward your target at 1g. Ship is built with the floors toward the engines. Halfway there, you flip the ship around and decelerate at 1g until you reach your target.
The point being, also according to Musk; “The best part is no part. The best system is no system.”
Overall, the fact that the US experiencing the longest period without capability of sending humans into space seems to be a serious organizational problem.
I think it's anything but. If the USA and other superpowers really wanted it they could send people up on short notice. Just look at the space race that started 50+ years ago. We have vastly better technology now and a lot more experience.
It's not an organizational problem, it's a money problem and a lack of goal problem. Sending people up is vastly more expensive than unmanned probes and as technology improves there's not a whole lot a human can do that can't be achieved remotely with those probes.
It's a bit sad but at the same time it makes complete scientific sense not to send squishy humans when a robot would be vastly more efficient overall.
Our best chance to get humans in space again is another propaganda war starting a new space race. Maybe between USA and China this time around, to find out who gets to Mars first?
that is an organization problem, but anyway I disagree with;
> Sending people up is vastly more expensive than unmanned probes and as technology improves there's not a whole lot a human can do that can't be achieved remotely with those probes.
It's not incorrect, but the Apollo astronauts would have covered the entire curiosity rover distance in 7 years in about an hour.
The rate at which humans on site would accomplish things is not to be scoffed at. Whether it's worth the other costs getting them there is still up for debate. But robots are not hands down better.
>that is an organization problem, but anyway I disagree with
How so? I guess I misunderstand what is meant by "organizational problem". For me it's "we want to do X but due to bureaucratic inertia and lack of organization it's impractical to do it". Like "we need to buy a new blackboard but in order to do it we have to go through a 29step process and 5 commissions so nobody bothers".
My point is that we're lacking the 'X' to begin with for space exploration. What's the big end goal currently? Putting humans on Mars? Some talk about it but nobody seems to be in a hurry and it seems more about propaganda and boasting rights than hard science.
>The rate at which humans on site would accomplish things is not to be scoffed at. Whether it's worth the other costs getting them there is still up for debate. But robots are not hands down better.
There's a trade-off of course but I would be very surprised if it wasn't in the robot's favor. For one thing to this day it's still unclear how we could send humans to Mars while maintaining them in good health. What do we do with them after the mission? They settle on an inhospitable planet or we find a way to retrieve them back to Earth?
Curiosity weighs 899kg, I doubt that humans + habitat + supplies + power + experiments + all the safety-related overhead of having live humans involved will probably amount to several time that mass (which as we know is a big problem with rockets, since more mass means more fuel which means more mass which means more fuel...). Let's not even talk about the trip back.
Sure Curiosity is slow, but once it's landed I suspect that the ongoing operating costs aren't insanely high.
That's all back-of-the-enveloppe calculations of course but I would be very surprised if sending humans to do Curiosity's work wasn't at least an order of magnitude more expensive, even if you factor the shorter total mission time.
> It's not incorrect, but the Apollo astronauts would have covered the entire curiosity rover distance in 7 years in about an hour.
Of course they could move faster but Curiosity isn't just travelling it's also taking a lot of measurements and doing experiments while it's moving. Additionally they're very careful with it because one the the main limiting factors for Curiosity is the lifetime of its wheels. It could move faster but there's no need and maintaining resources like wheels is more important than moving quickly.
Obviously pros and cons to both approaches. Both should be utilized when and where it makes sense to do so. We should not hold back in getting humans into space, but that doesn't mean we should just forget about bots either.
Not necessarily on-topic but we could send people up right now on short notice on the Dragon - we just happen to really want astronauts to come back alive and do everything possible to ensure that outcome. If this threshold was lowered as we optimized for other things (not saying it should, but clearly lowering risks costs time and money) then we'd have manned missions flying right now.
Its a money problem but not for the reasons you give, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk probably have more money than all the space agencies combined but I think the goal is they want to develop space and still have some money left afterwards
With the caveat up front that I'm a huge idealist about space: I think humanity would greatly benefit from building large populations in space. Once the systems are in place then any power generation, industry, or agriculture done in space means less pollution here on earth. Solar energy is "free", asteroids are "free".
The setup isn't trivial, but in the long run I think it is best for everyone.
Colonizing space itself is also significantly more useful than colonizing planets, because you don't need a planet. Any star system in the universe is potentially habitable once we can work out a way of getting to them.
Yeah, only because we evolved on the surface of a moist rock doesn't have to mean we have to stay on the surface of such rocks for eternity. Planets are still valuable though, but mostly for disassembly. Pressure only a few km into earth's crust gets too high for any serious engineering projects and I doubt this will (fundamentally) change even with future technology. So most of the matter that makes up earth can't be accessed... unless we dismantle it. Asteroids are great but they only contain a subset of the matter of the solar system.
True, it would be nice to move elsewhere so that we can fulfill our DNA's desire to spread out. However, the Earth is the only rock we've ever found life on at all anywhere, including within our own solar system. Before we blithely plan for Earth's dismantlement, let's acknowledge that the problem of supporting life off-world is still a completely unsolved one. Even living in orbit is unsustainable, with astronauts spending time in the Space Station having cancer-like reactions to their time there. We are still very anchored to our little blue rock.
While CRISPR is great, it's no wonder drug. Immortality within a decade is a cool dream but has nothing to do with reality. Also, once you researched a drug, manufacturing it is usually cheap, so it would be a bad business decision from the drug maker to limit it to the ultra rich. But we are getting off topic. I agree with your general point though: with sufficient progresses we'll overcome the challenges of living in space. Of course, humans are built for earth, but it's no impossible challenge.
The rocket equation says that if you want to do anything besides sitting in one place, it's super expensive. Moving mass around requires throwing huge amounts of mass away.
My understanding is that it depends on how common/accessible water is in asteroids. If there is a source of water then it can be split into hydrogen and oxygen for "free" using solar power.
Throwing rockets' worth of water away seems wasteful, but if we have it then it isn't that expensive.
It's much easier to make an experiment for a human to do than to make a robot to do the same experiment. It's also cheaper for the institution doing the experiment to do so so we get more experiments done than we would otherwise and with less material waste.
That's a sunk cost fallacy. If they don't have anything important to do on said space station it's better to leave it empty and save the money for other projects. Mind you, I don't know if that's the case but I'm just pointing out that the station being expensive doesn't justify pouring even more money into it if you don't have a clear objective.
It maybe by sunk cost. But it's still lost value, at least based on design life and planned/committed-to experiments/ missions, which I believe are booked up through 2024.
And I'm not sure sunk cost fallacy applies, especially in the context of SpaceX / Dragon. Although it could definitely apply to SLS.
If you wanted to argue that extending the life beyond 2024 or whatever it is, then I would agree with you, sunk cost is irrelevant.
I tend to only apply the term to something incomplete with run-away costs to finish. Or if something changes (demand-side) that renders said product to become obsolete before completion. I'd argue neither applies to the space station. Political whimsy shouldn't be a factor.
Are you really being serious right now? Please, inform all of us how space travel was possible in 1776. At best, one could make the argument that the invention of the V2 rocket was the first time space travel was possible.
But, 194X to 1961 is a shorter time frame than 196X -> 2019.
Given the fact that there are still some pretty difficult tests ahead and that they already incurred a significant delay as a result of the explosion in April I wouldn't bet on this happening on the proposed time table. Too many uncertainties.
Much like everything in aerospace, the NET (No Earlier Than) date is not the most likely date. In fact, it's almost tautologically obvious that you'll usually miss the earliest possible date, no matter what the endeavor. If Quarter 1 2020 was really the most likely time, they would've most appropriately given a NET date of by the end of this year.
It's a little frustrating that there's so little understanding of this, though. I blame lack of education.
If society stays in Spiral Dynamics stage orange, the education system will only cover things like this once there is profit in educating the public on it, like if asteroid mining becomes a thing (just an example, likely not feasible).
Had no idea [head of NASA] Bridenstine had visited SpaceX. This is really cool. Here [1] is a video Q/A with Musk, Bridenstine, and the two astronauts who will fly on the first commercial crew shuttle that he (Bridenstine) streamed.
For those unaware of the backstory there Musk recently had a major reveal of SpaceX's StarShip program. Bridenstine made a pretty direct jab the night before saying "I am looking forward to the SpaceX announcement tomorrow. In the meantime, Commercial Crew is years behind schedule. NASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer. It's time to deliver." [2]
That was generally not so well received, since SpaceX is engaged in Commercial Crew (the program to get astronauts to the ISS on commercial launches) but so is Boeing. And SpaceX is substantially far ahead of Boeing on this front. So it felt like a partisan and biased sleight since Boeing, who went unmentioned, has substantially more political influence and clout.
In the Q/A Bridenstine acknowledged he was not really correct on his assumption, which makes me like this guy even more (as he does genuinely seem heavily driven to get the American space program back on track) - even if I think he should have figured this out before racing to publicly Tweet. Looks like he genuinely wants to get Commercial Crew going ASAP and was worried that SpaceX was putting it on the backburner since StarShip is also a really big and extremely ambitious program being done at the same that as Commercial Crew.
More context, Musk responded to this somewhat snarky comment from Bridenstine:
> “From a SpaceX resource standpoint, our resources are overwhelmingly on Falcon and Dragon. Let’s be clear, it was really quite a small percentage of SpaceX that did Starship,”
His estimate was that 5% of SpaceX's effort is focused on Starship.
When a public figure makes a negative statement against a group or individual in modern times, it's generally a carefully calculated political play that's about as authentic as you'd expect of a politician. Because of this, even when their statement is wrong (and it often is) they'll simply double down on stupid. His rapid followup visit, let alone his public acknowledgement that he was incorrect were major indicators that he's authentic.
And this is a big deal because he is not only the most ambitious administrator NASA has had quite a long time but also the most politically capable. And that leaves me highly optimistic for the future of NASA. Bolden (the previous administrator) was everything you want on paper, but in practice he lacked both ambition and political skill. I've no doubt he very much had a love for space and technology, but he simply didn't have the toolkit to make it matter. As a result of this NASA ended up achieving little more than inertial progress for 8 years.
Maybe. He's done way better than I expected, I thought he'd be another idiot from congress who says global warming is fake - because that is what he was when he was in congress. He pretends today that he never said those things or changed his views or evolved or some bs (I figure that is just what he had to say to be in congress as a republican, I don't think he's so stupid as to deny reality in real life). He's played the political game and tried hard not to anger the SLS senators. If he was really effective, he would have figured out how to direct the SLS congressmen into doing something useful with that largess instead of the wasted billions and time that went into the Senate Launch Service.
If you are interested in the Space X vs Blue Origin vs ULA, and/or want to learn more about the birth of the private space industry I can recommend a book called: The Space Barons.
Why should we send people further than orbit, rather than robots? Robotic missions have been huge successes - you could have teams of people lead many robotic missions instead of one very limited human visit.
You may be interested in "Dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency" [1]:
> There is a widely held view in the astronomical community that unmanned robotic space vehicles are, and always will be, more efficient explorers of planetary surfaces than astronauts (e.g. Coates 2001, Clements 2009, Rees 2011). Partly this comes from a common assumption that robotic exploration is cheaper than human exploration (although this isn't necessarily true if like is compared with like) and partly from the expectation that developments in technology will relentlessly increase the capability and reduce the size and cost of robotic missions to the point that human exploration will not be able to compete. I argue below that the experience of human exploration during the Apollo missions, more recent field analogue studies and trends in robotic space exploration all point to exactly the opposite conclusion.
This looks like a case study in tendentious reasoning - for example "This is because much of the scientific benefit of human missions will consist of samples returned, drill cores drilled and geophysical instruments deployed, all of which were demonstrated by Apollo on the Moon, but none of which have been achieved by the MERs nor will be achieved by the more capable (and vastly more expensive) Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) that is due to land on Mars in 2012."
MSL is "vastly more expensive" than what? Not Apollo, and not a human mission to Mars, which are the benchmarks that matter in this context.
I am not opposed to manned missions, but the case for their utility is thin, to say the least.
It is cheaper and easier for a robot to return samples from mars if that is what we want to do. However not by much: either way you now have to carry a rocket and fuel to mars to get back with. It is generally cheaper just carry a full lab and study samples on mars.
Where humans excel is on the spot decision making: looking around and saying "that looks interesting, I'm going to ignore the mission plan and go over there instead". That is where great breakthroughs are found, but it is also where mission control gets mad because the important things everyone was interested in don't get studied for something pretty but otherwise uninteresting.
We know from earth that there are some interesting geographical features that are only a couple meters wide: such features on mars would not be visible from earth. Thus whatever is on mars needs to recognize interesting things and find it. Humans intuitively recognize interesting things (and do better with just a little training). Teaching computers to recognize such features is a hard, partially unsolved problem.
On the moon you can do remote control of robots from earth and get the same level of power from a robot if you want it. (do not read can as we should - there are reasons to not do remote control) You can't do that on mars unless you are working at a speed of meters/day, so whatever is on mars needs to have local control to decide how to get around and what samples to get.
Robots generally do best for solved problems. A factory can replace 100 humans with saws with two robots and get more accuracy, but the shapes being cut out of a flat sheet of steel of a standard size. When you only need one part it is often faster to have a human with a saw cut it out (this is less and less true as the design to part chain gets better).
The truth is there are advantages to both.
At the current state of technology humans can do more than robots. However robots are enough cheaper that we use them anyway: we still don't have the ability to get anything back from mars. Ethically we will not send humans on a one way trip with enough supplies to live on mars for two weeks and then die, so humans are not an option yet.
While robots will carry a certain array of sensors, imo a robotic mission has better ability to choose what to examine and choose what to spend time on, because the mission has experts that can think about these decisions for a week before making a call. The mission is under no significant time pressure when things go off-script.
The time pressure of a manned mission is significant - this ability to make decisions quickly is only necessary because of the time constraints of a manned mission and the need to be careful enough to get back. This time pressure can be a factor in making mistakes and irrepairably damaging the instruments or hardware you brought. In one instance, Apollo crew has destroyed a camera they brought by accidentally pointing it into the sun for example.
The flexibility of humans does not give any significant benefit if those humans don't have the time to use it. When every minute is planned for something, with some buffers to make mistakes, your ability to improvise only comes in to remedy your mistakes. And some are not fixable. The operation is exciting and all rests on the ability of 2-3 people and the preparation of dozens and their skill under time pressure.
A robotic mission has months to remedy some fuckups and come up with workarounds. Some things are not fixable either. But a robotic mission has all the knowledge of a team of experts and is not put on the spot - they don't need to be as superhuman. The operation is comparatively boring and rests on the ability of dozens of scientists and engineers. They don't have to prepare for contingencies as much, they can analyze a situation, compare plans, simulate consequences (such as software patches, hardware operation) and act on them.
Not just on the spot decision making (there are human operators behind Curiosity after all), but improvising a solution to a problem that was not contemplated.
Take for example the lunar rover fender that broke, and they patched together a solution on the spot. And compare that to the Insight Lander mole, which found a particularly hard-to-drill rock and can't move from the spot (after all, it's a lander, not a rover). Now they are trying to push it with the landers arm, but there's only so much that can be done.
>Where humans excel is on the spot decision making: looking around and saying "that looks interesting, I'm going to ignore the mission plan and go over there instead"
This is where the real advantage is. Intuitive curiosity is not something AI is anywhere near being able to replicate in a useful way. Plus being able to explain why something is interesting and worth investigating. Look at image recognition- even where it's extremely accurate, in the instances where it screws up, we topically have no idea why. (Like confusing a leopard with a hair brush.) Which in the context of exploration is not very useful. If we don't know why the AI finds a feature interesting, then how are we (or the AI itself) supposed to know what to do about it? How to further study it?
Every other comparison between humans and robots is somewhat debatable depending on context and mission.
Secondary is certainly reaction time, especially in the context of timely investigation. As someone mentioned elsewhere with large scale drilling, many types of equipment still require a human operator with near-realtime feedback to be used effectively and efficiently in a non-specialized manor.
If a rover on Mars rolls around a boulder and spots a little green man, or a pink Martian rabbit, they're probably not going to hang around and wait to be studied. More likely, it might dig a hole, uncovering water or some other unknown material that's evaporated or sublimated before it gets instructions on how to react. Of course if it's a pink martian rabbit, we'll have to wait 8-12 years to develop and delete a new rover with trapping capabilities. :-)
> Compare the 35.7 km traversed in three days by the Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972 with the almost identical distance (34.4 km) traversed by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity in eight years.
Yes, and the Rover costs 1/150th the price. We could send up literally a hundred rovers for the cost of the Apollo program and still have billions of dollars left to burn. We could build a giant Nolan Joker style money pyramid and roast marshmallows.
More-over all modern Mars missions are done on a relatively shoe-string budget using robots NASA knows are much less capable than they feasibly could construct. Basically Opportunity only went 34.4 km in 8 years because it was built by the NASA equivalent of 2 guys in a shed for beer money. Since the humiliating loss of Mars Climate Orbiter NASA has focused only on sending things to Mars they're not quite so afraid to lose, which means rather drastically reduced rover capabilities and lessened scientific payloads.
>Greatly increased efficiency in sample collection and sample return capacity. Compare the 382 kg of samples returned by Apollo with the 0.32 kg from the Russian robotic sample return missions Lunas 16, 20 and 24, and the zero kg returned so far by any robotic mission to Mars.
This is comparing apples to oranges. One of the great benefits of robots is they don't have to come back, which massively saves on the budget. Manned missions by necessity do need to bring about 3 x 75 pounds of dead weight (aka 3 man crew) back home, so you may as well have them line their pockets with rocks if you're just burning money anyway.
>Increased potential for large-scale exploratory activities (e.g. drilling) and the deployment and maintenance of complex equipment.
This I do agree with. Large scale drilling in the asteroid built would actually benefit from human presence, as it's far enough from Earth that light speed lag is non-trivial and mining in space will likely be a very complex, novel situation that will benefit from human level intelligence.
But just walking around on Mars, doing sample collecting? The case seems extremely thin. Especially as, even by the article's own admission, robots are improving to the point a human is only "1-2x better" than modern AI-assisted drones. Rather than the 1500x human-robot performance disparity the author highlights for earlier robots. Given the relative costs of people and robots, it's very much still tilted in favor of drones.
You can't compare the price of the Apollo program with one Mars rover mission. The Mars rover missions built upon the discoveries and experience from the Apollo missions.
Robotic missions are multiple orders of magnitude less inspiring or interesting to society as a whole, probably because human beings like to see human beings doing things.
For a good example, consider that the Moon Landing was a global, civilization-wide event, whereas even the most famous robotic mission has never been anything more than a popular news item of the week.
But the latter moon landings were news items of the week. And the latter shuttle flights weren't even that, unless they were carrying interesting cargo.
The last human on the moon was almost 50 years ago. Shuttle flights (barring obvious exceptions) were pretty routine; definitely not the most inspiring missions. But humans back on the Moon, or on Mars, in the 21st century and setting up colonies? That's completely different proposition.
This is true, in the movie Apollo 13 it's portrayed as part of the plot that TV stations don't want to do a live broadcast of the mission. This is based on historical fact. Even Mission Control told them to cut it short because there was a Baseball game on. The broad public was only interested once something went wrong.
As someone who lived in Florida most of my life, I can say that people were/are still in awe of every rocket that blasts off... probably because we could see it happen.
Maybe not quite as interested as when things were first getting going, but that's human nature "meh I've seen it before".
But even so, watching the shuttle and SpaceX go up is definitely exciting to those who can actually see it.
Ask around at NASA labs how people got into the industry. Among those who were born up until 1970ish, almost every single one will tell you that he was inspired by the moon landings. The trend goes on even outside NASA, when asking people in STEM industries.
Furthermore, I would argue - though I have not seen a study on it - that these are the most enthusiastic people, those who love their work.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Pretty apt for space travel, as well. The Moon Landing and Sci-Fi have probably done more for getting people into in science than a million textbooks and outreach programs.
You can first send robot to do slow and simple things, but once you want to do more, humans are much more effective.
From Steven Squyres, NASA Mars Rover Principal investigator:
> What Spirit and Opportunity typically achieve in a day, a human explorer could do in less than a minute. The Opportunity rover has traversed about 17 km in its five and a half year lifetime; this is less than the distance covered by two astronauts in their Lunar Roving Vehicle in a single EVA on Apollo 17.
Would you rather have 2.5 years of the same types of measurements (temp, pressure, magnetic flux) because you only sent those instruments, or a week of completely serendipitous data (orange regolith, the smell of lunar surface after reclosing the hatch, many others)?
What an odd metric. The moon cars only averaged 30 km total per mission, meanwhile we can send a hundred rovers for the same price. That’s why people think sending humans for brief trips is pointless. It’s the instruments you’re sending that collect data and sending people means you get vastly less data back, for the same price.
Self sustaining colonization is a worthwhile goal. Having people wander around on the surface of the Moon or Mars does not get you there anymore than learning to jump really high can teach you to fly.
> it’s the instruments you’re sending that collect data
When you know what data you want to collect (temperature, pressure, chemical composition) then I agree that robots are far more efficient. However, humans will measure the things that you didn't know were there. Discovery.
There were countless examples from the Lunar missions. Just as an example that comes to mind, we sent no colour cameras to the lunar surface as "there was nothing of colour to photograph". Despite that, I believe on the last lunar landing Schmidt (or Cernan?) noticed that the regolith was actually orange in some places.
You could argue that instead of a black and white camera, a colour camera could have been sent. But that is a different instrument package, and just as likely a million other sensor packages could have been sent. That is one human advantage - we have an extremely extensive array of sensors that come with us. In addition to those sensors, humans have processing and reasoning skills, dexterous hands, mobile legs, random-access memory, and are preprogrammed to solve problems, take interest in anomilies, and make connections between seemingly-disparate events.
During Apollo, color cameras were sent to the moon (both photographic and video cameras). But the "disease" you're pointing at rings a bell in my mind: the JunoCam.
If it had been for the science team, Juno would've gone without it. It was added as a late-time PR addition, based on hardware from a previous mission (the descent imager of the Curiosity rover). And yet, it has given some of the most astounding images from Jupiter we've ever seen.
it was designed to do exactly that though, those images simply aren't that interesting from a scientific perspective - but the scientists finally understood that public perception of science is at least in the same order of magnitude of importance as scientific results themselves.
Robotic missions have all the mental skills of humans, the decision making in a robotic mission is on-par if not even superior because of time constraints being virtually absent.
What robots lack as of yet are the motor skills.
Edit: I'm talking of course about non-autonomous missions.
They are examples. I've heard about how a geologist on Mars could do so much.
But sending humans to Mars too early, they won't get any science or infrastructure development done, it's just going to be super expensive trying to stay alive, maybe plant a flag for political purposes. A mission probably could retire engineering risk and proof operational practices etc.
Even Apollo, with a very limited time run, had significant evolution of the missions.
With Mars the launch opportunity gap problem is significant, hurting iteration speed.
Anyway, for more than tiny scale space faring, we probably need to get our resources from asteroids. Asteroid resources are the key to space.
We can send hundreds but we didn't. The problem with the current generation of robots is that they pretty much need to have to plan out a full fault tree for every planned experiment and mitigate potential issues with a lot of prepared hardware. Humans can be sent with a fairly generic set of tools, instruments and materials and more readily adapt their plans and experiments too the situation. I'm sure robots get better every generation, but we aren't there yet.
Robotic missions are cool. I'd certainly like to see more of them in inhospitable parts of the solar system!
Getting people out of Earth's gravity well and setting up a base somewhere that could grow by itself is super useful though. Imagine it like climbing out of a deep valley onto a plain (it's not literally a plain but the requirements regarding delta-v are so much lower when not going into a well at a planet). There are other valleys (or rather pits) in this plain (i.e. the gas giants, which have gravity wells that we wouldn't get out of again with current technology) but it's a lot easier to do useful stuff 'up there' once you don't have to climb out of Earth's gravity well each and everytime you want to do something out there.
You might really like Isaac Arthur on YouTube if you don't know him already. "Orbital rings" [1] in his "Upward Bound" series might be just right your alley. Of course, there's so much more he produced, it's even hard to keep up. I personally dream of some "Megastructures" he suggests...
Actually already began myself to think of a Dyson Swarm around Earth (for starters) which could then serve as a positional basis for future orbital rings. He really inspired me to think bigger, now.
It's absolutely right, but I'd argue we should still send mostly robots from the moon. There are enough people on Earth to look at interesting things in the returned data and seize the initiative once anything new pops up.
That's always a nice one. I had to exclude xkcd to find another graphic of the gravity wells because the use of this graphic is so widespread that it hid all other results.
Why should we do things instead of watching other people do them on TV?
If the purpose is purely functional, then to some extent I'd agree - there are a lot of tasks we can achieve faster and better with robots.
But we can't be there via robots in any meaningful way. Even if we manage to some day achieve perfect telepresence, the delay in response will make it continue to feel artificial.
And so there will always be at least some people with a drive to actually go there before we even start thinking about things like longevity of the species etc.
Why are human missions so much more costly than robotic missions? Answer: Life Support.
If our (very) long-term goal is to stake humanity's claim on other planets/asteroids/etc., then it makes sense to work on improving and expanding Life Support capabilities in harsh environments. I see it as an investment in the future -- it may not seem to have immediate benefits, but these are key milestones and steps for reaching the ultimate goal.
It's not really the life support. It's the lower risk tolerance, the need to bring people back and the tyranny of the rocket equation.
You can just abandon a robot on Mars. But if you want to send people to the Moon or Mars you will need to send them with a spacecraft and fuel that will allow them to return. The tyranny of the rocket equation then forces you to build extra large rockets like Saturn V, SLS or Super Heavy Starship. You need exponentially more fuel as you increase payload mass in order to have the same capability.
SpaceX solves that with refueling in low Earth orbit, that allows to scale rocket fuel needs linearly with regard to payload instead of exponentially. And with refueling at the destination in case of Mars. But the need to bring fuel with you is still a big limitation for the Moon missions.
> SpaceX solves that with refueling in low Earth orbit, that allows to scale rocket fuel needs linearly with regard to payload instead of exponentially.
I don't think that's the case. The rocket equation has the delta-v under exponent, not the mass ratio. Fuel mass scales linearly with payload in any case.
I don't think orbital refueling changes any scaling laws. It just means you can launch several small rockets instead of one huge one. Total mass launched stays approximately the same.
> But if you want to send people to the Moon or Mars you
> will need to send them with a spacecraft and fuel that
> will allow them to return.
Though you are correct for political reasons, there are more than enough people willing to take a one-way trip to Mars. I'm one of them. I love my family, but they know that if Patrick Forester calls me one day because he has only enough O2 for a one-way mission, I'm going.
I'd even go if the mission was to see which of the radiation, CO2, microgravity, nutrition, heat, or isolation kills me first, to improve that for the next bunch. I feel that the goal is that important. Lots of others feel as I do.
Pure science isn't the only reason for NASA's existence. The ultimate goal is always humans further afield than anyone has ever gone before. "boldly expand frontiers in air and space" etc.
With "getting the hell out of here" do you mean humanity in general or you personally. If you personally: Do you really think public spacetravel will advance that much in our lifetimes?
Personally I hope so, but I also doubt it will happen.
I expect it to advance far enough that I could get off of earth personally. However the competition for free (read government funded positions) will be fierce: I'm more likely to buy the winning lottery ticket 10 times in a row. Multi-billionaires will probably be able to buy a trip.
Put the effort into developing advanced robotics to explore space:
“In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe."”
Interesting. In my mind as well, it's too early for manned missions - everything we'd do will be similar to Apollo again: Short visits to show we can, then there's no plan to actually turn these achievements into a self-funding endeavour.
I applaud what SpaceX does because it extends our capability to do things in space and industrialize it. You need an industrial base to permanently house people.
This is mostly just opinion and dreaming but: I don't think we'll have people driving mining rigs on the moon, drinking a beer in their moon bar and missing home. I don't know whether human maintenance can even be a thing because regolith is so vicious to anything operating on the moon - you'd need so many people fixing the robots. That's why the real challenge is coming up with more robust automated systems.
I think new approaches to industrial operations can come from this (and maybe even post-scarcity approaches for Earth, if we see it's possible) if we have to plan and realize a remotely operated (or even automated) factory/mining site. Other than on Earth, there are no space constraints, everything is almost the same material, environmental effects on the moon are not a problem (yet). Any industrial site does not have to have the form factor of a terrestial one, it can be the size of ten airports and mostly consist of flat surface, where a few robots are driving around, moving tools and parts and goods.
But just as with human spaceflight, we have to find the business case for it.
Robots like Curiosity are very very slow. If we ever want to truly discover life on Mars, humans will likely be the ones to do it as they are just much more productive.
Exploration of the solar system could be the greatest human endeavour of the next hundred or thousand years. Both manned and unmanned missions will be needed.
Because robots are not that flexible / multi-purpose?
Considering the limitations causing a person harm would put on a mission, and the complexity of bringing them back to Earth again, I'd have thought it'd be more flexible to send a bunch of robots.
I think it ultimately all boils down to launch cadence, which seems to be the driving force behind how things are done in space.
Launches are rare, which means you want to pack as much value generators into your payload as possible, which now means your payload is an expensive one-off workpiece (vs. a mass-produced item), which means extra risk, which means more safety requirements around integration and launch, which means more expensive launches, which means launching less often, ...
So if you're thinking of sending something to Mars for Science, people look attractive (mass produced, can do a lot per dollar spent on getting them qualified for mission), but life support requirements make this too expensive, so sophisticated one-off robots fly from time to time instead. Now if we could increase launch cadence and payload capacity, which is what SpaceX is working on, we could start sending people... or we could load the Starship with multiple cubesat launchers and a payload bay full of remote-operated or semi-automated rovers and drones. In few missions, we could blanket most areas of immediate scientific interest with robots. In this reality, higher payload capacity and launch cadence would drive demand, which means both the scientific robots could be mass-produced, and there would be more iterating on design, increasing the amount of missions that could be done by machines.
The way I see it, right now what SpaceX is doing to enable manned missions is pretty much aligned with what's needed to enable proper robotic missions.
One reason is that it creates a whole new set of challenges that require innovation to overcome. Those innovations then have secondary benefits that can improve humans down on Earth.
Here's a wikipedia page listing NASA spinoff technologies:
Do both.. but whatever you do, don't hold back any progress on space exploration simply because there might be another option. We need to get stuff done. Yes, increase the number of robotic missions! Yes, send humanity further too!
Rationally, we shouldn't. We want to go, in part because space is so romantic. In reality space exploration is going to be like working in the deepest, most dangerous mine.
You are not wrong, but not correct either. The geologist will discover more in that week, but the robots have learned things about different parts of the planet that the geologist will never reach.
- politics surrounding it
- regulations
- money dependent on jobs (think SLS program)
- ever changing goals (bush, obama, now trump)
Should now just be a research only facility and fully give the mechanics of space exploration to private facilities such as Space X, rockets and Bigelow for the habitats for example.
To clarify this more. Nasa should be given monies by the tax payer for various projects.
Invest in such projects that require 100 years to come to-fruition to projects that can be achieved within 10-25 years and absolutely no government interventions! Just leave them alone and let them to their glorious work.
They should be projects that the private sector can't invest in because it's too costly. That said however, they should also act in a VC capacity. That researcher that wrote a paper about newer modes of transport? Throw $10m at him, put a team around him consisting of nasa scientists and engineers and see what comes out of this. Do this for 10 or 100 ideas and we'll get a lot of inventions.
Finally for gods sake, the current budget is 0.49% of the total spend. Increase that to 5%. If all the current engineers dedicated to the failed SLS program and moon base machinations were reassigned on separate projects like :-
- vasmir ion engines
- portable space nuclear reactors
- simulating gravity without needing a spinning chassis
- solving the galaxic cosmic rays problem with space ships
(and I could go on...!)
Would be a total game changer.