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.
> 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.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/53/2/2.22/212515
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
Numbers at population scale are hard to think in.
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.
That is, less of a... show?
What lasting effects of the moon landing(s) are there, to your mind?
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.
- 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1...
As are those color photos of the lunar flag:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Flag_Assembly#targetText...
What robots lack as of yet are the motor skills.
Edit: I'm talking of course about non-autonomous missions.
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.
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.
Edit: Here's a graphic I just found: https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057669320
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of...
AIUI this takes in the cost of both climbing gravity wells, and changing orbital speed and inclination.
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.
(another answer might be just because it's there)
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.
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.
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.
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.
This doesn't seem realistic without revolutionary advances in Physics.
Sending humans to outside the solar system doesn't mean they have to be the same humans that departed.
This is probably going to be nearly as big a problem as the engineering one.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/02/space/
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.
Stephen Hawkins agreed: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/05/stephen-hawking-human-extinc...
Personally I hope so, but I also doubt it will happen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750114 - 2014
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314781 - 2012
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."”
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.
This is mostly a historic development of NASA and how politics influnces it.
So the problem is not fundamentally with Humans but rather with NASA organisations.
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.
Except if you mean T-1000 or something...
And because they eventually want go to Mars, have a little scientific colony, etc?
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.
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.
Here's a wikipedia page listing NASA spinoff technologies: