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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the Rocket to Nowhere arguments address your points: http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

In short, as soon as large hairless mammals are involved in the mission, 99% of the mission's resources are suddenly consumed with keeping said large hairless mammals fed, watered, breathing, amused, etc. So basically, there's nothing left to do anything of much value, especially on any kind of reasonable budget.

Cost is the main reason robots have gone all over the Solar System and beyond, and the farthest any humans go these days is to LEO to hang out at the ISS.

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Yeah, but the whole point of the mission, robots or no, is to benefit large hairless mammals. So if the hairless mammals think it's to their benefit to be on the ship, that's where the resources go, assuming they can get the resources together. Of course if that's not the goal of a given mission, then robots are more likely.

Yes, humans make everything more complicated, but without them, there's not much point in doing anything.

I'd say this is completely wrong and this attitude is preventing us from advancing more rapidly in space.

There's a lot to yet to discover in space. Developing better tools, robots for example, to explore our solar system will also benefit us on earth. At some point the costs will drop and it will become safer, or we'll discover something valuable that we'll want to bring back.

If you look 100 years out, which route get use to having he most people in space? Let's release early and release often.

We've taken the probe launching approach for the last fifty years. Besides SpaceX, launch tech hasn't really advanced since then which really disproves your thesis.

We must stop our collective procrastination. Human spaceflight is the ultimate forcing function.

It doesn't disprove anything. We spent a few percent of GDP for a few years to get a dozen people on the moon then we got bored then cut the budget. I'd greatly expand NASA's budget, explore the solar system, build the tools to start constructing on Mars/Moon, etc and hoping find a great reason to send people.

It won't become cheaper and safer to get humans into space at any reasonable pace if we keep focusing all the R&D on how to get robots out there in a cost effective way.

Have you seen the type of landing solutions they're coming up with for the robots? They're all going in a direction driven by the realization that since they're not humans, they can afford to take far higher risks and subject them to stress that would otherwise be completely intolerable, so they're explicitly not trying to address the complexities of bringing humans into space.

I'm happy for work on robot probes to go on, but that's no reason to not also invest more resources in the groundwork for cheaper human space flight.

There's no reason to put humans out there. There are no aliens. There's nothing out there for us. That's why we send probes. Cheap probes. Unmanned probes.

If we happen to discover something amazing that would be interesting or beneficial to walk up next to at incredible risk and expense, then perhaps we would do a manned mission. But its far far too limiting to send people in every direction to do the exploratory probing. You can explore a 1000x more volume of space with robots than you can with manned missions. We can't even see anything worth sending humans to with telescopes.

We don't make manned space probes for roughly the same reason we don't make manned torpedos. There's no point to the expense and risk. Use the right tool for the right job and put down the science fiction.

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