NASA announces astronauts who will fly by the moon next year
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Short term, heck, I'd take the risk just to experience microgravity for a good while. Tourism and pleasure itself is utility.
As for this NASA project: the unspoken subtext for doing this is that the US doesn't want China to in effect own the moon uncontested.
And if the situation is dominance on the moon over China, a remote operated lunar base is far better than anything human staffed. A battle could happen and all the highly trained operators on earth are fine when their crafts meet their end. For a space based human army, however, when you lose your craft you lose highly trained operators as well as that massive investment you made placing them and maintaining their presence in space. A remote army therefore always wins, since it has a massive thermodynamic advantage of deploying cheap and light cargo into space versus people and the support they need.
Medium term, moving as much industry as possible off of Earth is a vital release valve for mitigating our destruction of Earth's biosphere. No other celestial body (to our current knowledge) has any biosphere whatsoever, and only a small number could even hypothetically support one. Strip-mining the Moon or Mars or Ceres or the umpteen-bajillion asteroids and gas giant moons entails no demolition of rain forests, no extinctions of animal species, no displacement of indigenous peoples.
Long term, moving as many humans as possible off Earth permanently resolves the risk of us destroying it. The end-game is for Earth to be a preserve, allowed to heal from the wounds we've inflicted upon it over the centuries.
The Apollo 17 rover covered 20 miles in 4 hours.
Ego and the human spirit aside, humans are better at exploring than robots, even with 50 years of advances in robotics.
Astronauts covered a lot of distance but they didn't do a lot of science. Though to be fair, they weren't there to do science. They were there to plant flags, take selfies, and maybe bring back some souvenirs so that science could be done back on earth. They didn't even send up a scientist until that last mission.
The rover there was primarily to establish ownership. Having done that, they stopped.
A team of humans might improve the efficiency of the robots, by repairing them faster and doing some other work locally. But for the same cost you could send up an awful lot of robots.
Name a robotic mission that has brought back more than 200 pounds of “souvenirs” from another world.
Eventually robotic missions will get there, but more often than not they will be as a vanguard for human exploration and settlement, because even though I put aside human motivation for arguments sake, in the real world humans have a deep desire to explore that cannot be placated with data from a probe.
I am willing to wager a human mission will not receive the same pushback, even if it's 10x the price.
The human angle here cannot be ignored.
Humans innovate, adapt, and overcome.
Think of it this way, the only advantage a human might have in space over a human on earth with an xbox controller or a predefined program for a robot is to do something in the event of a communications failure. However, a communications failure in outer space for a human mission probably means the mission has critically failed in some way and the humans are probably doomed without a link to mission control.
Looks to me you're trying to express your disapproval of human space exploration, but you are veiling it as a question. We are friends here on HN, no need for rhetorical detours.
> I can’t imagine a situation where you need a human hand in outer space and not a mechanical one.
I suppose you imagine that robots can do everything that humans can do. Maybe in theory, but in practice it's not even close.
I just haven’t heard an argument that its worth the risk to life having some utility inherent to a human in space, that you cant otherwise get with some sort of remotely operated device. Unfortunately a lot of the decisions with the apollo mission wasn’t necessary purely scientific, it was designed to achieve military and political objectives too, so its hard to say if having astronauts were strictly necessary. Or if they were necessary with the technology of the 1960s, its hard to say if that would continue to be true today given advances in both robotics and computing.