Orion has splashed down off the coast of Baja, California
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People keep asking why this is a big deal- we did this fifty years ago, right? It should be a lot easier now with modern tech.
Yes, but now we're doing it safely. The Apollo program took risks that today's NASA never would allow. We're better at that now, but it's a lot more work.
Mass drivers and orbital elevators are common in fiction but I don't know what the scientific consensus is on the viability of such structures.
But in fact, the minimum cost imposed by gravity (the energy needed to get into space) is incredibly low. The minimum fuel cost is a very small fraction of the cost of launching with current launch vehicles. The costs come from expendability and manufacturing and non-fuel operating costs. None of these are dictated by gravity.
Every kg of fuel is a kg of cargo you can’t launch. That’s the cost.
Where do you suppose the need for so much energy comes from?
For example, the NASA contract to Aerojet Rocketdyne to manufacture RS-25 engines is costing $146 million per engine. Each SLS launch will toss four of these engines in the ocean for a total cost $580 million. And that's just the engines of the core stage. For the cost of a single engine, they could have instead purchased an entire Falcon Heavy launch, which has two-thirds of the SLS lift capacity (and has to obey the same laws of physics as SLS).
SLS is the price NASA had to pay to get Congress off its back.
Having a well functioning space program? Doesn't benefit them much or at all.
Ultimately, it's because voters don't call them on their BS. If you've been a NASA fan, encouraging NASA funding regardless of what it's for, you're part of this problem.
This isn't just a NASA thing, a NASA contract is probably pretty small compared to getting a new military base, or keeping one open that the military wants to close.
It scales a lot with gravity. Compare the cost of a vehicle capable of reaching lunar orbit (e.g. the Eagle), with the cost of getting humans into Earth orbit (e.g. the Mercury-Atlas). And the Eagle carried two people.
The benefit of launching from altitude would not be the potential energy, but the lower air pressure and density. The first would enable rocket engines to operate at higher expansion ratio, and the second would reduce aerodynamic forces. The benefit is apparently not large enough to justify the difficulty of operating on a mountain.
I can imagine two different answers to that and depending on which one you tend to think more there are two different answers to your question.
If you are thinking: space is high up therefore the higher we start the easier we will get there.
The problem with this is that getting into outer space is not that hard, staying there is the hard bit. The international space station orbits about 408km away from the surface of the earth. That is not a long distance. If you would have a car which can travel the same speed a car can usually travel but straight up you could reach that altitude in about 4 hour easy driving.
What is important is what would happen after you reach that elevation and turn off the engine of your car. If you have seen astronauts serenly drifting in space, you might expect that your imaginary car would do the same. But that is not what would happen. You would see that your car starts falling and rapidly!
In fact there is a word for such a flight path. It is called a suborbital space flight. Space flight because it went to space, but “sub” orbital because it lacked something to stay in orbit.
What is that something it lacked? Why do the astronauts float gracefully while your car plumets? The trick is that the astronauts plumet too! They are constantly falling back towards earth, they just go so fast sideways that the earth rolls out from under them. In fact that is what an orbit is. You are falling around the earth with a very high sideways speed.
In essence staying in space equals being in orbit which further equals going very fast.
So now you can see that being high is not the hard bit of staying in space. Flying as fast as a bullet is the hard bit, and of course starting from high won’t help with that.
But! You might think a different thing why launching from a high elevation might help. Maybe you already know that staying in space == going fast. So you are thinking: what hinders us from going fast? The drag of our atmosphere! If we would launch from high there would be less atmosphere around us, thus there would be less drag, thus we wouldn’t waste so much energy to fight it. And you would be right! If you could launch from a high elevation you could spare some energy because there the atmosphere is thinner. But when you run the numbers you see that this is a very small percentage of your total energy expenditure. Mostly because our rockets fly through the dense part of our atmosphere relatively quickly wasting only a little energy to fight drag. Launching from a high elevation would come with it’s own set of challenges of course and wouldn’t help that much relatively.
So depending on which thing you were thinking about you have an answer. Hope it explained the problem better. If you have any more questions about any of the details let me know and I will try my best to explain.
Also sorry for answering this long a seemingly simple question. Would love to answer shorter, but you know it is “rocket science”. ;)
Reminds me of Eve on Kerbal Space Program. Gravity so high and atmosphere so thick that I had to use a helicopter contraption to lift the spacecraft to the highest possible altitude in order to get the rocket to even make it to space to say nothing of the absurd delta-V needed to actually inject into orbit.
My guys were stuck on that planet for a long time...
Of course it's expensive. Surely if these things were built in space instead engineers would be able to build simpler, cheaper spacecrafts.
The actual amount of energy needed to reach LEO is about the same as the amount of energy needed to send the same mass to New Zealand from the US by airliner.
The reason launch is expensive is because the launchers were thrown away. SpaceX radically reduced the cost by reusing the first stage multiple times. And there's more juice to be squeezed from that lemon, as the second stage is still being expended.
Yeah but rockets use a lot more fuel mass compared to aircraft whose engines are airbreathing. Rocket engines need to carry their own oxygen in the fuel tanks and are less efficient as a result. Surely fuel costs are no trivial concern.
> The reason launch is expensive is because the launchers were thrown away.
Well I agree that it's stupid to just throw away the rockets into the ocean but I thought NASA just didn't have the capability to reuse them. A comment below says the US congress forced them to reuse old parts which makes no sense to me.
That's insane. Isn't it literally their mission to advance spaceflight technology?
I assumed there was a good reason they were not reusing the rockets. Are you seriously telling me it's due to politics and corruption?
After the end of the Apollo Project, "politics and corruption" were all that was left, as should be obvious from the lethally ridiculous design of the Space Shuttle.
> as should be obvious from the lethally ridiculous design of the Space Shuttle
Can you elaborate? Everyone here is calling it stupid but I don't really understand why. I thought it was retired due to expenses, NASA defunding or something like that.
Perhaps start with what killed two shuttles and their crews? Besides no provisions for escape unlike all other "capsule" based craft, solid rockets are _dangerous_ because you can't turn them off, whereas liquid fuel rockets will effectively turn themselves off in many disaster scenarios.
So for a get me out of here tower escape system a solid rocket makes a lot of sense, see also their use in ejection seats. But mounting some number of them (more than one unless used alone because you need symmetrical thrust) on the sides of your system means they must work perfectly every time.
The reentry heat shield protections which along with the wings etc. came from a requirement the Air Force says they never really wanted or needed, a single polar orbit mission returning to the launch location which thus required a lot of maneuvering in the atmosphere because the Earth turned while it was up there resulted in the infamously fragile tiles and some more refractory stuff for hotter locations (and eventually a bunch of tiles in a cooler location were replaced by something else).
Rear end heat shields are protected during the launch of a capsule, it's all hanging out there with the Shuttle. Change the foam and larger parts of it may break off, hit, and fatally compromise a part of the insulation system.
Now going from personal worry points and speculation:
The Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) are for institutional reasons extremely high performance and required a rebuild after every mission, so the SLS "throw away half a billion worth of engines every flight" would need to subtract that labor and parts.
That said, they were fired up and the SRBs not lit until it was clear the SSMEs were running fine, that resulted in three legit aborts and two from faulty sensors. Two failures after launch, split between both causes, noting catastrophic or mission endangering. But, still, you have all their complexity and SRBs.
Landing ... well, that's another thing that's more complex or at least different although landing in the sea also has its issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_4
It's a hell of a lot more complicated aerodynamic body/system than a cylindrical rocket and capsule system so that work was harder and more error prone. IBM Federal Systems modified a lot of code between the first and second launches, and caught an introduced error that would have released just one SRB. There's a 1984 CACM issue devoted to all this https://dl.acm.org/toc/cacm/1984/27/9 and is now free to read online or download, I highly recommend it. A lot of programmers outside of that world were concerned the code wouldn't be up to snuff, what you'll read in those articles explains how they pulled it off.
And, again, no escape systems. Fly enough times and things go wrong, the Shuttle compounded this by massively increasing complexity for very little gain.
When people have looked at airbreathing launchers, they quickly discover that the designs optimize to 0% airbreathing, 100% rocket. LOX being so cheap and dense is a big part of that.
Indeed NASA doesn't have the means to reuse them, which makes it sad that NASA is being forced to play to their own incompetence in the SLS program. NASA originally wanted to get back to the moon with commercial launchers.
It turns out fuel cost rarely exceeds 10% of the cost of launch even with the tyranny of rocket equation. Traditional expendable rockets (including SLS) essentially throw away 90% of the cost of each launch - hence the push by SpaceX to some of the fuel to try and land the first stage.
It does sound kind of stupid to just let the engines and stages free fall into the ocean now that you mentioned it. I'm not sure how advanced Musk's rockets are but if they can land safely after being staged then that's an amazing innovation. Why isn't NASA all over this if it's so revolutionary?
NASA is all over it from what I see - SpaceX has essentially captured virtually all of the commercial launch market and a good chunk of defence and science markets except for hyper specialized requirements or non-US defence launches.
I however don't see how NASA could have developed it given the politics involved with its funding essentially incentives Project thinking over Product thinking - I actually use that as an example when I contrast Project vs Product at work. SpaceX had to blow a couple of dozen rockets AFAIK to get to a stage where they land reliably - doubt NASA could have justified that to the US Congress. NASA's funding incentives encourage a risk averse approach to engineering ever since the very high profile failures in space shuttle and the early Mars missions. Witness how the Mars helicopter was rated for a low single digit of missions and has now completed a few dozens.
I should point out it isn't forces that matter for entry from orbital speed, it's heating.
Certainly it could have been partially due to not yet having enough experience with many real world launches.
But at the same time a lot of the funding was comming from ICBM programs that don't really care for reuse by design & from army and a high profile space race with USSR. That kinda favored the expensive get-it-done fast expensive MVP instead of a more complex reusable solution that could be much cheaper in the long run.
And then the status quo took root & reusable rocket proponens were no longer taken seriously because - what were they thinkig, this is how we have always been doing it!
Disagree as someone who as a kid watched this happen in real time. The Saturn V follow on was always planed to be reusable, with a huge first stage booster that was something of a bigger brother of the stage that would make it to orbit. NASA was starved for capital after Apollo and this resulted in the horribly deadly and very expensive to operate kludge of the eventual Space Shuttle.
> the minimum cost imposed by gravity (the energy needed to get into space) is incredibly low.
This is straight up false.
Think about how little propellant it takes to move products on Earth. And that's not even counting for the fact that transport vehicles on Earth runs a heavy percentage of its life time while a rocket does not do that. Even Falcons spend most of their time getting ready or recycled and not on an ascend or descend trajectory.
Any real trade will not happen at these gravity tax rates.
What does this sentence even MEAN? There are economical uses of space at today's launch costs. There would be even more such uses if launch costs were a few times the cost of propellant, as the cost of air travel is.
I get the feeling you are not thinking clearly on this subject.
Sending tourists? Sure, tourists are already up there and it costs even less propellant to drop to the ocean floor but not many people/business seemed to be doing that. Maybe with the exception of oil platforms.
Speaking of which, what oil platform will be of space? Even a floating city in space that is purely afforded by the tourist spending generates no true economic value up there - all of it is being essentially propped up by the ground. What economic incentive are there?
The only way out is to manufacture IN SITU, sourcing from locally or gravitationally less burdensome locations, like the asteroid belt. It takes less deltaV to go to the asteroid belt from LEO than it takes to get to LEO from the ground.
Trust me I've been thinking about this plenty - though probably not to any use.
Antarctica is also an analogue for manned science. Reduce costs enough and it makes sense to put people in space rather than do things remotely. There's a base at the South Pole. The cost to get there would be similar to the cost of getting to LEO, in this few-times-propellant cost scenario. Yet no one talks about automating that base, it just doesn't pencil out.
Lower launch costs will enable much larger satellites to be built, with much larger apertures of antennas and optics, and with higher bandwidth, or with much less focus on expensive mass optimization. We could see satellites in high earth orbit being maintained manually.
At a few tens of dollars per kilogram, space disposal of nuclear waste starts to make sense.
But plop a few mining complexes (each couple dozen tons IIRC) on the Moon or near Earth asteroid and the tables turn quite quickly. As now you can build more station from extraterrestrial resources, which mine said resources and it goes from there. :-)
At 20c/kWh it would cost $100 to lift a 2 ton car and 4 occupants into space, or $100 each to get to the c. 400km altitude of the ISS.
Of course to stay in space requires far more energy as you also have to go sideways, fast. Very Fast.
But it's still pretty low. Sticking 1kg into Geostationary Orbit and keeping it there would take about 15kWh. A 2 ton vehicle with 4 passengers at 20c/kWh would be $1500 each.
Of course we lack a practical way of doing this other than with rockets, and thus enter the tyranny of the rocket equation. But the fuel cost is still far lower than the cost of the entire shuttle or apollo system, as shown by the efficiency of SpaceX -- fuel costs of $20/kg to LEO, or $1500 for a typical adult.
The problem in space access isn't an energy problem, it's a method problem.
But I did touch on that in the last paragraph -- the energy required on a rocket to get into LEO is $20/kg, or $2k/person. It's a tiny amount of the total cost of launch.
A large crane is far more efficient at lifting items.
But even if you accept you have to use a rocket, the cost of the fuel is trivial compared with the cost of launch.
If you could vary the exhaust velocity of a rocket continuously, so it was equal to the total delta-V so far, the efficiency of converting jet kinetic energy to vehicle energy would be 100%, as the jet would be left stationary in the reference frame of the launcher. (This ignores gravitational potential energy and also that the mass ratio would diverge to infinity at zero velocity, but never mind that.) In practice, using a lower Isp first stage and a higher Isp upper stage partially implements this, and the overall efficiency isn't too bad.
The cost is like $1500 to $2000 per ton so like $500 000 to $1 000 000 in fuel costs for a launch.
Fuel costs are still trivial compared to building and operating the rocket and is where huge reductions are possible.
Starship is an interesting project with a lot of ambitious goals, but it is far behind schedule in terms of development and the Raptors are suffering from a lot of issues that Merlins didn't have due to SpaceX's inexperience with cryogenic fuels.
So the question to be asked is: do we want an pricey but reliable and proven solution now, or do we hold out for years in the promise of some intangible futurist idea that will likely take far longer than anticipated to become a viable solution for crewed travel? If your answer is B, then it's fairly obvious you're less interested in the rapid progression of space travel writ large and more interested in ensuring a project you favor wins out.
In a perfect world, SLS would be a rapidly reusable rocket with 5 RS-25s, an inflatable heatshield, F-1 derived liquid boosters, and landing legs. But that's not the world we live in, and something > nothing, in my opinion. And I also find it important to put the price of SLS/Artemis in context to other far more wasteful government projects that produce no surplus economic value for people, like the F-35 program or the B-21 (questionable benefit over existing defense systems). In that context, SLS is almost utilitarian, providing valuable scientific jobs to engineers and scientists, while propelling the way to the Moon for this generation's astronauts and explorers.
Starship is not needed to condemn SLS. Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are sufficient to render SLS uncompetitive and unneeded.
In a perfect world, SLS would have had a stake driven through its corrupt programmatic heart years ago.
The Falcon 9 has a farther greater claim to that.
The only way to measure reliability is experience, and there has been exactly one (1) launch. It will take another 20 to get a good reliability figure, and we won't get that: we cannot afford to ever launch that many.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/content/about-human-landing-systems-dev...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Ar...
is this a joke? you couldn't pay me enough money to take a ride in it.
the thing has been into space once. where are you getting this "exceptional reliability" idea from?
Not sure where you got the idea F-35/B-21 are questionable benefit over existing systems from(we don't know enough about B-21 to say this, and F-35 seems to have proven itself by now).
Shouldn't that be what we optimize for in the long run? Its the only way I can think of that space cargo becomes economical. Then you can ship raw material up to the Moon and build from there, launch from there etc. and vice versa.
Maybe we'll see what Helium-3 can do for humans at that point
Isn't the moon tidally locked and that's why we never see the "far side" of the moon?
And the lagrange points are between us and the moon?
If so, I don't understand why the anchor on the moon can't be fixed.
And then of course you need to supply power to anything climbing it - which is an immense amount of energy required to climb 30,000+ miles vertically - and there's no practical way of sending that energy up the cable itself (you could do it with superconductors, but the power requirements for cooling thirty thousand miles of superconducting cable is more than many nations consume). One option is to use microwaves to beam power to the climber, but this is currently only theoretical, and raises further materials science issues with the microwaves heating up the cable along its length.
Finally, having a space elevator is a massive hazard to the Earth in general. If most structures on Earth fail, the damage is limited to a small area where the structure stands. If a space elevator ever fails for any reason, it would wrap around the equator as it fell, releasing the equivalent of two Hiroshima bomb every mile along the equator as its kinetic energy is rapidly converted into heat. It's not quite as bad as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, but it would still be enough to significantly alter the climate and wipe out at least half a billion people from the impact alone. It's not a project that should be undertaken lightly.
> equivalent of two Hiroshima bomb every mile along the equator as its kinetic energy is rapidly converted into heat.
Little boy was 15 kilotons of TNT (63 TJ). Kinetic energy is 1/2 mv^2.
So you are claiming that the mass of a mile of the cable is such that mv^2 = 126e12 J
At equator the planet rotates at 463.8 m/s so you are assuming that the bottom mile of the cable weighs 585.5e6 kg? Ok, you're completely off base here.
Maybe let's look at a higher segment (at geosync orbit). Velocity there is 3.1e3 m/s. You are assuming a mile of that cable weighs 13e6kg. But on the way down it will both ablate (lowering mass) and slow down (lowering velocity), so you are assuming an even more insane higher number.
For comparison, a mile of one inch thick steel cable is ONLY 4e3 kg. Sure, space elevator needs something stronger, but even more so, lighter.
Yeah, you are just off by MANY orders of magnitude, and that claim was likely pulled out of nowhere
> descending from geostationary orbit will accelerate something to about 10e3 m/s, further increasing the energy.
In vacuum, yes, but we have air...resistance
That last paragraph doesn’t make sense though.
There are currently no plausible way to avoid collisions of such a structure with satellites which are below the geostationary orbit. Sooner or later each passive satellite will hit the elevator, and active satellites will have to actively avoid collisions for the whole time they are on the orbit. Any collision would likely disintegrate the satellite and bring serious damage to the elevator - easily enough to break the elevator; after all we're talking about colossal kinetic energy in collision.
Even if nanotubes would be used and could work by themselves - I'm optimistic on that - the inherent conflict between space elevator and the rest of cosmonautics currently is enough to prevent this idea from working.
Depends what you mean by economical, but a totally, rapidly reusable craft that takes mass to orbit would massively reduce the cost of getting mass to orbit. Not as inexpensive as a space elevator, but more achievable in the near term.
Now NASA need alternatives to Musk, so SLS is a good back up option.
* canned laughter *
(only semi joking considering his Ukraine starlink BS)
SLS designs ONE (mostly) disposable ship, per year, max, taking a decade to integrate and realize. Epic Waterfall. They have several concurrent pipelines.
Meanwhile SpaceX designs a reusable ship factory. Scalable to as many a year as you can afford.
Hence, the need for a back up or private competitor. Ideally as efficient. If not, then at almost any cost is the only alternative (NASA).
There's little that is groundbreaking.
Mercury through Apollo really did not like the idea of using solid rocket boosters, you can't turn them off if things get out of hand, and of course they'll do that themselves in lots of failure modes. Suitable for a launch escape system ... and see the Shuttle for when these principles were turned on their head.
Its SRBs, now being literally recycled for Artemis were low capital, high operating cost kludges that infamous killed one shuttle and its crew. In part because there was no provision made for escape aside from the pilots in the first couple of launches or so and that was rather limited, SR-71 technology with a pretty low max altitude.
On the other hand the Orion crew capsule does have a tower escape system.
So that old NASA you decry, they didn't lose a crew except on the ground due to a high pressure test with pure oxygen!?!?!! OK, that's a credible validation of that part of your thesis, see also Apollo 13 which was a close call.
On the other hand does the Orion have a heavy shield for the astronauts to shelter behind in case of a solar storm (see Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars)? If not Apollo and the Artemis program are every bit as dangerous in what was a primary reason Nixon stopped Apollo before all its planned missions, program delays would have extended it into the change in the solar cycle.
I would also note the start of this program many years ago was so badly designed the booster system's vibrations would have been lethal to humans. Springs in the crew capsule were part of the proposed solution to that, but going back to Shuttle diameter SRBs, only adding one segment, and all the mass of the tank and SSMEs should have fixed that. If my memory is correct that was a rocket powered by a single stack of SRBs, purely for sending crews out into space.
But I'd like to know what happened after the Shuttle and it to make NASA take crew safety seriously. NASA was utterly callous about the known risk from the launch that killed the second shuttle and its crew.
I finish by noting a bit of humility is warranted after just a single test mission success. That NASA and its contractors were able to pull it off is quite a feat, but as the Shuttle should have taught us bad designs can eventually catch up with you.
It's a miracle that everyone that went to the Moon returned unscathed.
It's useful to think about safety issues in terms of the statistical value of a human life. This is how much one should be willing to spend to save one expected life. It's a vital number for planning purposes. For example, should we install a guard rail at this corner? Is controlling this release of this chemical justifiable? Compute if the cost is less than the expected value of lives saved. If so, spend the money, if not, don't.
The usual statistical value of a human life is around $10M. And you immediately see the problem: a rocket that costs $1B to launch is, in effect, killing 100 statistical people just by being launched. If the result of the launch is valuable enough to justify that mathematical carnage, wouldn't it also justify subjecting the astronauts to real risk? Conversely, if it's worth delaying a launch to reduce the risk to astronauts, is the launch really worth having spent all that money on at all?
The space program has been caught in an internal contradiction, where the purported benefits are claimed to justify large expenditures, but not claimed to justify risking astronauts. And this makes no sense.
To actually justify reducing astronaut risks, launch and mission costs must first be greatly reduced.
Trick question! Almost everyone does and doesn't see anything wrong with it.
I would not want to get into an expensive risky rocket, since I don't see the benefit that would be commensurate with the enormous cost. If the cost were radically reduced, I might try it, and in that very much cheaper rocket the safety level would be much higher (or else the actual cost, including risk x value of my life, would swamp the ticket price.)
At least, the loss to NASA will be much more. For one, they're going to spend a ton of money on investigagions. For another, it could significantly impact their future budget, and their ability to hire. It would depend on the details of the deadly incident though.
Our course is clear! We must design launchers as cheaply as possible, to launch as many people into space as possible, to transmute them from relatively worthless disposable units into valuable astronaut heroes. Even if 10% of them die (say) the net increase in their overall value will make the effort totally worth it. They don't even have to do anything up there; just being an astronaut is inherently valuable, I am being told.
The engine design is 41 years old. Older than many people reading this.
But the in flight pictures and videos afterwards were pretty nice! :-)
I’d presume it was a mistake.
I think they understand perfectly, and the capsule splashed down "off the coast" of "state of Mexico".
No different from saying "The capsule splashed down off the coast of British Colombia" or "The capsule splashed down off the coast of Queensland".
They know perfectly well what Baja California is and where it is.
except for the comma in the middle of the name, which was ytdytvhxgydvhh's point:
"The capsule splashed down off the coast of British, Colombia"
right, it's a typo, it doesn't matter, and there was already a reply 4 hours before yours that said as much, so i'm not sure what you were aiming to contribute with the reply that doesn't acknowledge that it is a typo
"all the people complaining" = up to 1 person
That's a long time and a lot of money.
1. They don't need life support that amount to 2000% active mass. Maybe 20% since we can still count solar panel as their life support.
2. They are far far far more sophisticated than what they used to be. Especially with modern processors. We can even embed some level of AI decision making onto these robots so they don't need to call back home for every decision.
3. They are far cheaper and can tolerate far lower safety margin. We can potentially even mass produce them and launch 50 at a time.
Imagine if we're just throwing a bunch of rovers on moon and each of them are capable of suicide burn and landing themselves. Maybe 2/10 will fail but we still get 8 rovers that can just roam the moon for fun.
Every year tax payers specify where their tax money goes. 50% of their taxes will go directly where they decreed it be. The other 50% and any debt can be allocated by the congress.
There should also be options of "Let congress handle it" and "whatever the previous years makeup was" and options to adjust from there.
NASA will probably be better funded, by a huge margin.
This is why we elect representatives. It’s not a perfect system but the average citizen would not have the context necessary to make direct decisions on it.
The big reason for that is that the robots are very modest in their overall capabilities. With humans, you can't get cheaper than the cost of sending one, or better few, people, but when you cross that line, you suddenly have a lot of functionality for free.
A human living on Mars could operate multiple geographic exploration rovers at much higher speeds than currently (existing rovers get 0.1mph max). This is the benefit of having a 60ms ping time instead of 6-20 minutes. Plus the ability to troubleshoot, clean off solar panels, run slightly different analyses without needing to build it into the probe 8 years ago, assemble sensor stations, etc.
Yes the mass budgets for manned missions are titanic. But with even half-way good mission planning we can get more science done than the equivalent mass of robots - at least for Mars and the Moon. Food and life support mass for long trips to the outer planets (or shielding for Mercury) mean robots will win there.
If the goal is just to have N robots/rovers on the moon for fun/data collection, then we don't need to send humans to space.
If the goal is to bootstrap a profitable space/Moon industrial complex, then we will need a lot of robots (some autonomous and some remote controlled from Earth) and a number of humans in the center of events. Humans are critical for keeping automation working and for adjusting to unforeseen circumstances.
If the goal is a profitable space industrial complex somewhere other than Earth, than humans probably need to be there, but that seems like way way ahead of what we're thinking of.
We're not even close to bootstraping a cluster of autonomous robots on the moon, taking over the basic functions of base operations. Any humans at current stage is basically on sightseeing duty.
That's not really fair to say that people are there just to observe. For instance, Apollo folks took a lot more of geological samples that Lunokhods did and from a larger variety of places. The difference in mass was about 1000x (almost a ton vs almost a kg), geographical coverage was about 1000x and getting to different features was immensely easier for humans.
— Captain Kathryn Janeway, One Small Step, Star Trek Voyager Season 6, Episode 8
Neurons may be hacked so blind persons can see through a device.
The abstraction is more easily done by placing a screen in front of the eye so no invasive surgery is needed while images from far away cameras can be presented to the brain.
Disclaimer: I don't believe in metaverse and do not work for meta.
It also covers global lunar exploration, science and commercial developments to show that our return to the Moon this is truly a worldwide trend and how valuable each vertical is.