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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

> Seems to me that adding humans to the mix greatly increased the complexity and risk of the mission.

We spent the last few years watching robots with state of the art 21st century technology and software crash on the moon repeatedly, and yet, in the 1960s a few hot shot test pilots could stick a landing on their first try. Given the choice between robots and humans, I’ll take the humans.

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You're reading history in reverse. The Soviets landed a robotic probe on the moon years before the USA succeeded with human pilots,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9 ("Luna 9")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#M... ("List of missions to the Moon—Mission milestone by country")

You absolutely don't need sophisticated technology or giant budgets to accomplish this.

Except, Luna 9 was soft landing attempt no. 12 - the point is the humans pulled it off on landing attempt no. 1.

Counter point: first unmanned US soft landing attempt succeeded 3 years before first manned attempt. Surveyor 1 - 1966 Apollo 11 - 1969. I bet that NASA learned a lot from 7 unmanned Surveyor missions and that contributed to the success of Apollo 11.

Luna 9 used an airbag system, not a soft landing system.

Human ingenuity aside, I wonder if sending humans on missions can offer higher success rates due to higher stakes for all involved (the cost of human life). When we send humans to the Moon, the pressure to get things right is higher and consequences of failure are very dire. Sadly, of course, not a guarantee of success.

Which then leads me to wonder...

The risk vs reward calculation for human-involved missions is necessarily higher than robotic missions.

Is that additional cost an order of magnitude higher? IE, we can afford one and only one human mission, but three robotic missions? Does the math work out in favor of the single high-success mission, or the three slightly lower success missions? Obviously depends on the expected success rate and cost of each.

But, probably why we haven't done a lot with human missions since the 60s.

I am not sure such utilitarian math is the true solution, attempts to put a number on the value of human life seem all silly. I would rather say that the failure of a robotic mission costs an amount X, while the failure of a human mission intuitively has infinite price.

Conversely setting human life to infinity cost quickly breaks down with the trolley problem. Any problem where groups a or b are going to die then whatever group is bigger lives, even if it doesn't make sense, such as group b is all very old and group a is very young but slightly smaller.

Trolley problems are an exercise in utilitarianism and maybe generally consequentialism. If those are your views, then you can probably put a number on it. Other views are available, however. (See sibling mentioning deontology.)

To be fair, it's not really a breakdown of the trolley problem. It's the point of the trolley problem. Setting the value of a human life to infinity basically gives you deontology, in that both outcomes are approximately equally bad, and thus your choosing to get involved at all is unethical.

> in the 1960s a few hot shot test pilots could stick a landing on their first try.

Ha you mean the most costly, engineering first and politicized science and engineering endeavor ever attempted, and even though it was some kind of little miracle ?

Read about missions like gemini 9. Its a sheer stroke of luck the moon mission worked, it could have easily failed and there would have been no rescue.

I didn’t want to pipe up right when it happened with my non-expertise but seriously, that Odysseus lander seemed liked a pretty dumb design. Of course it tipped over. Come on

I am also an armchair expert but I've played enough KSP to know that their design could have worked, but they would have needed to really stick the landing. Or add enough reaction wheels so it could self-right.

> that Odysseus lander seemed liked a pretty dumb design

It was built thin and tall to fit within the Falcon 9 fairing. It didn't have extending legs because these would have become possible points of failure. The crash happened because the altimeter wasn't working, which IIRC was due to a pre-launch assembly error. As a result Odysseus landed outside the safe operating parameters of the landing legs.

it's a movie. they wanted, like, human drama which is substantially more difficult if the main character is not alive.

That's an astonishingly bad take that requires gratuitous cherry-picking of data.

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