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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

If manned stations aren't doing any particularly unique research, especially research that couldn't be done with automation, why spend huge resources on them?

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Maintain american capacity to put technicians in low earth orbit. People forget a big part of the shuttle mission for example was to capture and put technicians not just on your satellite but any satellite the shuttle was capable of intercepting and getting into the bay. Consider the fact that the shuttle didn’t really die, in fact the airframe form is still flown but its mission is now classified.

It's cheaper to launch replacements than it is to do maintenance (at least, if you plan it that way).

There are not classified shuttle equivalents launching, not sure what you are talking about there. The X37 has the capability to land, but it is not manned and is tiny compared to the shuttle.

X37 is what I am talking about. Same form: big flying satellite workshop. Just reduced footprint, and obviating the human so it could spend years in orbit and maximize cargo. But if they decided they needed a bigger X37 for larger bay space seems it could be done pretty trivially given shuttle experience. Or one stocked with a couple of those robots that just goosewalked with Melania Trump contorted into some packaging.

If the shuttles ever tinkered with any satellites they weren't meant to, it was relatively boring ones in low inclination orbits, not the really cool ones in earth observing polar orbits. We know this because the shuttles never went to those orbits.

I'd be very surprised if they're genuinely out of research ideas to test in space. If that is actually true then humanity has a problem.

>research that couldn't be done with automation

I'd think there is room for both. Automation makes sense, but don't think the versatility of meatbags is entirely there yet.

> if they're genuinely out of research ideas to test in space

A bigger problem is lack of expertise. Astronauts are not specialist in whatever is the topic of the current experiment. You need probably like 5 years of training (assume the second half of the undergraduate degree, and perhaps the first half of the PhD). So experiments must be fully automated except for a button to turn they on and off.

Lots of research has technicians doing the actual experimental tasks, your argument would benefit from even a short list of experiments that have not been done because astronauts couldn't be expected to handle it.

We don't really need to send "astronauts"(highly trained operatives) to space anymore. SpaceX has made that happen.

Meatbags are versatile but really, really expensive. They require a really vast support system, and it has to be highly redundant because the cost of a loss is so high.

You can send up a lot of less versatile bots for the price of one meatbag.

An entirely different form of research could be done by sending large quantities of normal people into space. Astronauts are such a small sample size (and so thoroughly vetted) that you get a different statistical view.

Horses for courses micromanagement business administration and lobbying gravy train.

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