Hacker News Reader

Comment by hobbes78 | Hacker News Reader

Definitely scientists have an opinion far from unanimous, as Stephen Hawking finds the idea "Stupid. Robots would do a better job and be much cheaper because you don't have to bring them back."

http://www.todayinsci.com/H/Hawking_Stephen/HawkingStephen-Q...

View on HN

If you look at the justification it is totally circular -- "we need to send people to the moon to learn how to send people to Mars".

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.

When you omit the humans, you omit the humanity of spaceflight. Neil deGrasse Tyson sums it up best:

  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]

Plus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi636wl6a1w

[1] http://www.space.com/8184-robots-humans-space-colbert-tyson-...

That sounds like empty rhetoric to me. Is there actually any evidence for the manned space program being "the force that excites people to want to become scientists in the first place"? I am skeptical.

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.

Well this isn't meaningful in any way. But my earliest memory of wanting to be a Engineer was watching the Space Shuttle launch on TV when I was a young lad. Then I went on to destroy our VCR the same day.

I think you're not considering the human condition. I'm not against robots, in fact, I am a huge fan of automation, but I think it's hard to ignore the fact that "astronaut" regularly appears on the top of "when I grow up" achievements. Not a coincidence.

Think of a manned Moon mission as more of a propaganda piece for the Mars-exploration party.

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.

You're engaging in the same question begging as the scientists in the linked piece. If we accept for the sake of argument that manned moon missions further the cause of manned Mars missions, that still leaves us without a justification for manned Mars missions.

Manned Mars missions aren't any more "productive" than manned Moon missions. Both are terribly inefficient from any scientific or commercial perspective.

There is no commercial perspective that does not include humans somewhere. The economy IS humans. Manned missions to other planets are exciting. Robot missions to anywhere are slightly more emotionally engaging than watching your Roomba sweep your kitchen floor.

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?

More like the bête noire of the Mars-exploration party. If you're going to the Moon you're not going to Mars.

If you're going to Mars, you're building infrastructure that can be reused for the 690 days of every 780 day cycle that you're NOT going to Mars. Going other places therefore has a lower marginal cost. Thus if you wanted to go to Mars anyway, throwing in a few Moon missions along with Mars is not as expensive as doing the Moon missions independently. Also, as I already mentioned, it keeps your experts employed and the public engaged.

But you're never going to get the same level of funding for robots that you'd get for a manned mission.

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.

>But you're never going to get the same level of funding for robots that you'd get for a manned mission.

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.

I don't understand how robots could do a better job than humans at the job of 'being a human walking around on the moon'

What's the point of being a human walking around the moon? If you can do what you need to do with a robot it's a much safer and less expensive option. Much of the reason for sending humans to the moon was as a politically motivated show of technological superiority. Sending a robot to collect soil samples, perform a experiments, and then rocket the results back to Earth was the approach preferred by many of the engineers and scientists working on Apollo. Sending men who would "fly" the spacecraft was a less scientific decision.

"What's the point of being a human walking around the moon?"

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.

They should have sent a poet... then we'd have one poet less.

Really? We have too many poets?

Because at this point in time, walking around in another gravity well is kind of bad-ass.

If all you want is soil samples, definitely send the robot. But if you want to be bad-ass, send some humans.

"What's the point of being a human walking around the moon?"

"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.

I'm of the opinion that sending frail probes to take grainy pictures and scrape rocks to get small samples for limited onboard labs would do far less science in a year then six guys with shovels and a pocket camera in a month.

In an nutshell, because people want and are willing to pay to. That creates demand which people like Elon Musk (a) represent and (b) are willing to work for and finance.

And furthermore people like Robert Zubrin (Mars Direct) will probably see it as yet another conspiracy to take funding away from what ought to be the real manned exploration mission of the 21st century, which is of course a manned round trip to the red planet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com