Wish you the best luck and hope that this will lead to some serious competition. Soyuz is great but we need to do more as species.
> The exception to the rule is when referring to the Manned Spaceflight Center (also known as the Manned Spacecraft Center), the predecessor of Johnson Space Center in Houston, or to any other historical program name or official title that included “manned”
Space exploration and exploitation is awesome, but shouldn't the first items on the "do more as species" todo list be about taking care of earth?
Of course robotic missions are better for exploration than manned mission. Manned missions costs so much we could do so many more robotic missions for the same cost. People are absolutely not required in space.
We send people into space because we can and we want. Because we keep separate track of record of things achieved by actual human beings. That's why we list who beat 100m or marathon record even though we have machines to move as around much faster. Because standing a human on a mountain, sea bed, or a piece of rock in space is an important step for us to prove we can command nature around us.
Can you imagine being wrong on that? That people can and are cheaper than robots for certain important aspects? That accomplished space robot makers would disagree that robots are at least universally cheaper - or better in other aspects?
> We send people into space because we can and we want. Because we keep separate track of record of things achieved by actual human beings. That's why we list who beat 100m or marathon record even though we have machines to move as around much faster. Because standing a human on a mountain, sea bed, or a piece of rock in space is an important step for us to prove we can command nature around us.
I suspect you're mixing several significantly different things into one here. Token achievements, like current champion in sport X, are one thing. Genuinely advancing, say, science - like on ISS - is another.
If you are still not convinced, we have sent a robotic missions to almost every larger body in solar system, yet we are excited today we can send two people to LEO. Just look at costs involved...
Humans cannot do anything in space without tools and tools in space is a bunch of electronic signals that are either processed locally or sent to Earth. The things people do in space is either trivia (yeah, have fun with this ball of water in zero-G) or studying behavior of human body and mind in space to be able to send more humans to do the same.
We have learned how to do very complicated things without humans involved. Hovering a craft in Mars atmosphere? Orienting craft with extreme precision? Running complicated manouvers at the ends of solar system?
Look at missions which are only possible because we can send a craft on decades' long journey. If people were necessary we would not be able to do anything of that. Any human mission is limited to short hops from Earth to Moon, maybe Mars, until we advance our science and technology way, way past current level.
Sending people to space isn't really advancing science (except studying how people fare in space). It is another token achievement. There isn't physics we are learning IN ORDER TO or BECAUSE we are sending people to space. Physics is advanced by physicists. There might be some technological advancement necessary to send humans that would not be necessary for robotic missions, that's all, really.
Take a close look at what people in space are doing. Find anything that requires humans in space?
Don't get me wrong. I am all for human presence in space. Just be realistic about why we are doing it.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/servicing/index.ht...
Would it be cheaper to build a replacement scope and launch it instead?
As to Hubble, that is pretty bad example. If people were present with Hubble they would be able to do exactly nothing. Everything was prepared on Earth and only then sent to space.
Also, the cost of servicing mission was almost as much as it would cost to make a copy of Hubble. The cost of servicing mission was reported 250M and the cost of sending Hubble was reported 4.7B but from what I remember most of this was R&D, making software, tools, developing plans, etc. A lot of spare parts for Hubble were already available (it is typical to have copy of everything on Earth for debugging and so on).
Robotic missions have the option of being scrapped and sent again which is not really an option for human missions.
We have all the resources we need here on Earth.
And rocket science is only one small part of the overal industrial effort of launching rockets.
In all honesty, that's like saying that Jack the Ripper could work as a surgeon.
in general, there's a lot of items on the urgent list, there's so much money to go around and you don't want to invest everything in endeavour X only for Y to be worse and catch you by surprise.
so you allocate some budget to secondary research as well. NASA doesn't even burn that much in the grand scheme of things.
There are two alternatives...
1. Non-nuclear hot wars.
2. A single global authority.
Now another pole rises in China and so a return to a "cold war" like system is possible. Personally, I hope we can come to an arms control limitation with China. In 20-30 years, even force parity will be charity on their part.
That's solely because the USSR collapsed and Russia is only a regional power, not a superpower. Russia has a small, weak, backwards economy that is of modest global consequence. It severely limits their capabilities. Russia's position on the global stage is still eroding. Had the USSR somehow survived and continued to this day, the Cold War would not have ended. Putin as an authoritarian dictator-for-life is unable to push his view of how things should be, onto very much of the rest of the world. Putin is boxed in, contained, by Russia's various weaknesses.
The contrast could hardly be greater with China, which is clearly going to be far beyond anything the USSR ever accomplished in most every sense (from financial/economy to technology to military to global influence).
China under Xi has chosen an aggressive authoritarianism domestically and a so-called Wolf Warrior policy internationally. They continue to push forward ever faster in those directions, rather than turning back. The fundamentally conflicting world-views, democracy vs dictatorship, market economies vs arbitrary command economy, liberal vs regressive, human rights vs lack of human rights, is why we're entering cold war round two. China's position under Xi on nearly everything is fundamentally incompatible with the rest of the world continuing to make liberal progress. Something has to give when those two visions meet, and that thing will guarantee a new cold war that will split the planet in half.
Go down the long list of liberal ideas & topics, and look at where China stands, and then consider where the world should ideally stand. China stands opposite nearly every liberal idea you can name. There's your cold war, and nothing can stop it short of China resuming the brief period of modest liberalization they underwent before Xi took over - or the world giving up all the liberal progress it has made post WW2.
Something like that needs to hapen with robotics before we no longer have people who do the undesirable jobs.
There's this movie "Downsizing" about people getting miniaturized and live lavish lives as their material needs get smaller. It's not a very good movie but what stike me in the move was that even in that kind of society they needed to have miniaturized people for the labour that no one wants to do and they had to have slums and so on so that the society works. I find this very realistic because even though we have rich countries and poor countries, we still have to have income gradient everywhere so that some people will do the jobs that others don't want to do.
I don't think that this will go away without eliminating the need for near slave labour.