Scientists Petition U.S. Congress for Return to the Moon
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
http://www.todayinsci.com/H/Hawking_Stephen/HawkingStephen-Q...
Much much more science can be done for the same price if you omit the humans. The commercial viability threshold is much much lower if you omit the humans. The one and only reason to send humans up to space in the foreseeable future is patriotic chest thumping. Well that and to stroke the adolescent fantasies of those who grew up on science fiction.
Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium,
agreed with his interviewer in saying that "the manned program is a force
of nature on the educational pipeline of America. It is the force that excites
people to want to become scientists in the first place." [1]
[1] http://www.space.com/8184-robots-humans-space-colbert-tyson-...
Even if true, there are likely far more cost-effective ways of generating the same interest, either with robots or other educational programs. I don't see why a robotic program can't be inspirational. And anyway we don't have any shortage of scientists right now.
Not ever. It's never going to happen.
So the comparison is pointless.
The only way you'll ever get that level of funding is to send humans, and now and for the foreseeable future, humans are going to be much more capable. Notice I didn't say efficient, because again, efficiency is a moot point. Efficiency only matters if you get the same scale of funding. And that's just never going to the be case.
It's pure fantasy to think otherwise.
That's okay, there's plenty of other worthy things to spend government money on. If it's manned or bust, I'll take bust. Maybe a future generation won't be so childish.
The Moon is days of travel time, whereas Mars is months of travel time. Round-trip communication delay to the Moon is seconds. Delay to Mars is minutes. Pieces of the Moon can be returned as souvenirs. Delta-v for returning bits of Mars is ridiculous. People can SEE the Moon with the naked eye, even in urban light pollution. Mars requires a map of the sky and a pair of binoculars, at least.
The Moon is important because it motivates the nonscientific people of Earth to support more productive forms of space exploration research. It reminds people that this is not only a very small world, but the only one we have. And it creates a seed economy with a shorter possible cycle of iterations than a few missions clustered around the same 3-month launch window every 780 days. There is some merit to having regular shorter missions to a closer target, so that when that window comes around, you have people with steady jobs and experience around to run the longer missions.
It isn't just about the scientific benefit. You also have to consider the human factors. Nobody wants to train for years to be unemployed 90% of the time, waiting around for the next time someone needs some specific skill. The thing about Moon missions is that they can be done with resources that would otherwise be mothballed and rusting, or used once and discarded.
Manned Mars missions aren't any more "productive" than manned Moon missions. Both are terribly inefficient from any scientific or commercial perspective.
Star Trek succeeded as a television show because it had human actors telling a story, to the point that this fiction is more popular as an entertainment franchise than actual space exploration? Why? Actual space exploration has only produced a handful of biplanetary pedestrians, and only John Glenn has made any kind of a big deal about it.
In my view, the end goal of space exploration is to transplant Earth-origin life to other planets--not just humans, but (at minimum) thousands of species. That goal is not served by ignoring the transporting-the-biologicals portion of space exploration. That means I am completely unwilling to fund with my dollars any scheme that allows other people to fritter away money on pure science that will never become applied science, specifically science applied to my personal lifestyle. Multiply me by the six billion people who will likewise never escape our gravity well, and you had darned well better start thinking about the politics and the economics along with the science.
In short, I don't give a fig about whether it would make the boffins happier to do something else. Humans in space is what I am willing to pay for. If they don't want to play along with my non-optimal prejudices, I'd prefer that they be cut off from tax-derived funds entirely, and go with exclusively private funding. Ask for public money; act in the public's interest. The public is interested in seeing people in space.
It IS stupid, and doesn't make sense. What else would make it a uniquely human endeavor?
The exact same thing as you walking around your neighborhood. Why not just send a little RC car with a camera? We exist in the universe, and it' as large or small as we make it.
I like big.
"Much of the reason for sending humans to the moon was as a politically motivated show of technological superiority."
Haha, you answered your own question. Sending a "probe" would not one-up China's Jade Rabbit. Frankly, I welcome another "Race" rather than another "War On...". China is ramping up and the US cannot keep their edge by standing idle or privatizing cosmic exploration, IMO.
If all you want is soil samples, definitely send the robot. But if you want to be bad-ass, send some humans.
Yes, we can (probably) do more science and for cheaper with robots. Yes, we can (probably) develop the same technologies we would other wise by focusing just on automated exploration but there is one very important thing only human exploration can do:
Inspire generations of future scientists
Never underestimate the power of seeing someone personally going where no one has ever gone before or doing something that has never been done before. Thousands of people cross the straight between England and France everyday, but when someone swims across it makes the news. Thousands of people skydive everyday, but when Felix Baumgartner jumped from higher and faster than anybody before it made the news. How many of the older generation of scientists and engineers chose (at least initially) that carrer path because they grew up watching Neil Armstrong bounce around on the Moon? Or watching the now defunct Space Shuttle take people to the edge of space and dreamt of doing the same? A big project similar to the space race could make science and engineering sexy again, and would have one other advantage that only giant projects with clearly defined goals have:
It focuses research in one direction, speeding up technological evolution
The reason why a bunch of nerds in the middle of the New Mexico desert were able to build an atom bomb in practically record time was because everyone had a clear idea of what the goal was and it was immediately clear when progress was being made towards it and when it was achieved. The same thing applies to the Space Race. When Kennedy first said "we choose to go the moon in this decade" it was far from clear that it would even be possible. But it gave everyone a clear and inspiring goal to strive for. "We choose to send a bunch of circuits to the moon" wouldn't have nearly the same effect. This is the reason we now talk of "moonshot projects" (and google has a whole division for them). They are almost impossible but the goal is sufficiently clear and inspiring to make people work hard until they are accomplished.
Imagine what would be possible if Obama were to say "we choose to go to Mars before the end of the decade" and actually provided NASA and private contractors with the funds to do it? What technologies wouldn't be developed and commercialized that we haven't even dreamt of?
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm34Muv6Lsg is a good summary.
Trouble is, its also highly likely that it'll be the Chinese leading the way. If they didn't have such a violent history of human rights abuses as a nation, I'd be a little less concerned, but as it stands right now I can't see Chinese domination of space-based industry being a good thing.
Then again, it might just solve the pollution problem if we can just push China up into space, and use clean technologies for deliveries back to us here on Earth. Here's hoping it happens within the next 50 years, anyway!
PS: For scale the US reserve was over 1 billion kg of helium last I checked which works out to something like 100,000+kg of H3. At 20% effecency it takes ~260kg of H3 to run a 1GW power plant for 1 year. So, we might want to start mining H3 on the moon, but after getting 10+ H3 reactors running for 20+ years which is going to take a long time. However, I suspect where going to ignore designing H3 reactors for similar reasons as we are ignoring thorium basically the fuel is no the expensive part of nuclear reactors.
Mining it on the moon is an idiotic attempt to rationalize its commercial value. In fact: lunar thorium is 3-4 orders of magnitude more abundant than He-3 [0][1], so if you wanted helium-3 from the moon, it would almost certainly be cheaper to mine lunar thorium instead, and use lunar nuclear fission reactors to synthesize it! Which doesn't fit in anyone's stupid sci-fi fantasy.
For what it's worth, [0] estimates the total amount of he-3 in lunar regolith, over the entire surface, as only 2.4 million tons -- barely a fossil fuel.
[0] http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2007/pdf/2175.pdf
[1] http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n8/fig_tab/ngeo1225_F1...
Robot #1: locate he-3!
he-3 robot finds he-3 on moon!
Send 2 more robots to moon.
Robot #2: build he-3 reactor!
reactor robot starts to build reactor ..
Robot #3: build little factory for making: robots!
robot-building robot builds robot-building factory ..
reactor robot is finished! Just Plug In!
robot-building robot is finished! Plugged In!
ROBOTS in SPACE!!
(Edit: to answer this - "the fuel is not the expensive part of nuclear reactors", yes the most expensive part of all this is doing it on Earth.)
Though at the pace we're headed back to the Moon now, we're probably about on target to match the perennially thirty-year-off working fusion reactor.
I think the only thing stopping us is the place to do it safely, and maybe the Chinese have realized that doing such things as he-3 experiments on the moon is probably not so difficult, after all .. I mean, of all the countries on Earth right now who would benefit from this sort of 'clean energy' production, it'd be the one place on Earth that humans have utterly shit on. So I'm all for it, by the way, even if it involves hot space Nazi's ..
I highly doubt there is any reason to be on the Moon right now than preparation for total industrial exploitation. It may be that the Chinese space program is the only thing that will get China de-polluted.
That said, I would love to see greater involvement of entities like Space X in a return to the moon. Space X has already proven it can do what NASA has already done, 50 years later, but at much lower cost. That's actually a pretty reasonable path to commercializing space. The problem here is lack of any market for the service. Space X worked because there was an existing market for launch services.
SpaceX replicates NASA's orbital launch capability with efficiencies to spare. The redundancy does not, however, extend to deep space exploration, landers and rovers, and sundry scientific and technological endeavours with limited near-term profit potential.
Okay, so Apple and Microsoft and Google probably could bankroll a modern Apollo program. But doing so would be corporate suicide. There is absolutely no way it would yield returns in any time frame that would be acceptable to shareholders. This isn't the web, where capital investments are small enough that investors don't need a monitization story. If companies are committing tens of billions of dollars, there needs to be a compelling story of how they're going to recoup that investment and make a profit. Space X had one: launch contracts for commercial and government satellites. There is no such monetization story for the moon.
Exactly. You could think of a project on the moon as building a platform, much in the way that the formation of the US was building a platform: creating something that allows other people to generate new wealth on top of it. The benefit to the originator companies of ownership over something like that would be enormous, without them having to do all the work.
You're assuming the entire cost needs to be bankrolled by a single entity or company. No such assumption needs to be made.
> There is no such monetization story for the moon.
North America was less interesting to European monarchies of the 16th and 17th centuries than South America, because they didn't think they'd find any gold there. Never mind the millions of acres of fertile land, or the opportunity to build a platform that would allow millions of people to create new wealth with the right incentives. Confusing the concepts of wealth and money, they turned down the opportunity of acquiring wealth because it didn't look like money. I think you are making a similar mistake. It's not a personal criticism per se: just like it would have been perfectly normal to assume kings and queens were right not to be interested in North America at the time, it's perfectly normal to assume big corporations would be right not to be interested in the moon today.
It might be worthwhile to use Earth-to-Moon travel as a benchmark -- such as we used "crossing the Atlantic" or "New York to LA". Otherwise, what's the use?
1) I suppose we could build factories to make stuff too dangerous or difficult to make on Earth. But LEO would probably work just as well more cheaply. 2) Build a "Super Guantanamo" where "life without parole" has some real teeth.
We might find LEO, Sealabs, and near-Earth asteroids more useful. Going to Mars would be more difficult and more imaginative.