Comment by deelowe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deelowe | Hacker News Reader

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NDT* does an excellent job explaining this every time he gets a chance to do so. One of my favorite quotes is him saying something to the affect of "take a look at the pioneers of space exploration. Note down their age. Notice a trend? They all grew up during the apollo programs! Why? Because sending a human to the moon was exciting. How many people do you see today with posters of the rockets that carried Perseverance or the rover itself versus Apollo or even the Shuttle? We must put people in space, not because the science demands it, but because of the impact it will have on society."

Sending humans to Mars isn't about exploring Mars. It's about the impact this would have on society as a whole. Suddenly, there's another planet out there that we care about and focus on. Perhaps wars on earth seem just that much more petty? At a minimum, it will likely inspire a whole new generation to explore the cosmos.

* Neil has his flaws, I get it, but I've sort of come 360 on him. His exuberance is contagious and as ambassador for space exploration, his approach does have a certain "public resonance" to it that I've not seen from others even if he tends to embellish things...

> NDT* does an excellent job explaining this every time he gets a chance to do so. One of my favorite quotes is him saying something to the affect of "take a look at the pioneers of space exploration. Note down their age. Notice a trend? They all grew up during the apollo programs!

That doesn't make any sense at all. The "pioneers of space exploration" would obviously include the people who did Apollo [and Sputnik, and Mercury, etc], and they obviously did not grow up during the Apollo program, unless NASA has a time machine they're not telling us about.

Most of the pioneers of space TODAY got into space b/c of what they witnessed with apollo and to some extent, the shuttle. According to NDT, budgets and education enrollment has been down because of a lack of enthusiasm and this lack of enthusiasm is b/c we no longer have people EXPLORING the frontiers of space (the IST doesn't count).

> Most of the pioneers of space TODAY got into space b/c of what they witnessed with apollo and to some extent, the shuttle.

1) that "TODAY" is a pretty important qualification, and 2) it's a stretch to call those people pioneers. I live in the American West TODAY, but I certainly shouldn't be labeled a "pioneer" like the people who moved to this area 150+ years ago.

I think the word is being stretched a bit, but not much. Space is not inhabited by any meaningful number of people, and very few have been, so for the foreseeable future anyone simply leaving Earth could be called pioneer - among the first to explore a new area.

Feel free to substitute a more appropriate term. The premise doesn't change.

No idea who NDT is, but I'm kind of afraid that doing something like a Mars mission too early will turn out having the opposite effect. With the tech available for a soon-ish to launch Mars mission, chances are pretty high that something would go wrong catastrophically, there's just so much complexity that cannot break down for such a long time under extreme conditions, we're not ready for that. Watching the people we send there die slowly and horrifically isn't going to be a rational "we knew the risks" thing for the general public, people will be horrified and it'll put a big damper on future endeavors of this kind. I'd expect manned spaceflight to be pretty much dead for decades after that.

Exactly this. The current hype for a human on Mars is repeating the mistakes of Apollo then the Shuttle. By contrast the public has absolutely been engaged in what rovers and telescopes find.

Did we fly to the moon too soon? Did we squander the chance? In the rush of the race The reason we chase is lost in romance

And still we try To justify the waste for a taste of man's greatest adventure

Tasmin Archer - Sleeping Satelite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Ck38Cl474

I feel like spacex is the only group that has a chance at landing on mars this decade, and Starship is exactly what we’d want if we were trying to make a self sustaining mars colony right?

NDT = Neal deGrasse Tyson. Astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, a pretty big science communicator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson

He’s conflating all of the resources spent with the outcomes involved. Need to see the graph?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-Budget-Federal.svg

Now imagine if those same resources were spent on fusion propulsion…

Whataboutism.

I don't think he's confusing anything. He's saying the only reason those funds were allocated were because:

1) The government wanted to do it (military reasons)

and

2) The public found it exciting (we're putting a man on the moon)

Without either of those, this wouldn't have happened.

Those two “reasons” are no where in the same universe. Take away the Soviets and it wouldn’t have happened. See also the last 60 years.

I said both were important... The military push already exists today. See SpaceX...

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