- This topic has 26 replies, 8 voices, and was last updated 18 years ago by
elviss_boy.
elviss_boy.-
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Ken Plattner
Ya know, I’m not taking a position either way, BUT there are alot of things that robots just can’t do. It’s takes the human element for true discovery. True, robots can collect data and take pretty pictures, but thats about it. It takes real people to analyze, decipher, and form conclusions based on the data. Robots take the risk out of space travel, but they don’t make discoveries.
I guess I am taking a position.
Perhaps the shuttle and space station haven’t produced many so called scientific advancements, but think about this, it’s the experience gained from flying the shuttle and building the space station that are the advancements. One day, hopefully very soon, all of the knowledge and experience gained from building the station will be used for building a base on the moon, and then for building a base on mars and then for building a base somewhere else. But we’ll all be dead by then.
It’s about gaining practical knowledge and experience in the mechanics of space travel that matter, not the so called scientific discoveries. Those will come AFTER the robots have collected data and the experts have determined that the data is worth investigating by humans…
Bruce R. Schaefer
One day, hopefully very soon, all of the knowledge and experience gained from building the station will be used for building a base on the moon, and then for building a base on mars and then for building a base somewhere else. But we’ll all be dead by then.
Very well said, Ken. You can’t get one without the other. A robot may find a suitable planet for man, but who will make the decision? And, c’mon, guys… how close is a suitable planet for human life? We’re talking light years. So as far as exploring THIS solar system, robots are cheaper and better at providing objective data, but only scientific data that WE determine relevant. Yes, Mars can be terraformed–but we’ll wait a million years or so, and perhaps Jupiter’s moon Europa has life under its ice. We NEED speed of light transport–beam me up, Scotty!, or near it if Einstein’s right, to get anywhere. As much as all of us love the roar of rockets, IF anyone is visiting OR we’re going any where, it’s got to be by other means. We’re just dribbling around the pond… sorry, I mean parking lot. Didn’t mean to shift analogies. 🙂
Anonymous
…robots can collect data and take pretty pictures, but thats about it…..
…it’s the experience gained from flying the shuttle and building the space station that are the advancements….
I respectfully disagree, on several levels. Many of the probes didn’t just collect data, they brought samples home…. some of the finest pure science ever done was with the Stardust probe, which returned material from Comet Wild 2 http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news113.html Cassini dropped an incredibly sensitive probe (Huygens) onto Saturn’s moon, Titan. It did a *lot* more than take some pix. Genesis brought back samples of solar wind — even though it made a hard landing in Utah without parachutes, the experiment was largely intact (Astronauts would not have fared so well). There are three examples from the top of my head that are much more than a few photos. BTW, samples from the Stardust and Genesis missions were shared with hundreds of labs around the world. Much pure discovery has come from those missions. I believe it is the Stardust mother ship that is actually still out there working.
Regarding the knowledge learned from the ISS. Wasn’t that what Skylab or Mir was for? Even the Nobel Laureate (quoted at the top of this thread) can’t come up with a thing that has come out of the program. I guess I don’t see how building a multi-billion dollar glider that has never been more than a few hundred miles above sea level gets us any closer to Mars. The Russians had men in space for many consecutive months probably 20 years ago, to study the long-term effects of living in space. We didn’t need ISS for that.
Just my 2NS (ok, 4NS) worth 😯
Ken Plattner
John, I aggree. But there is a human element and a necessary one for space exploration. All of the probes you mention would not have even got off the ground if it wasn’t for what we have learned from human space flight.
Many of the probes didn’t just collect data, they brought samples home…. some of the finest pure science ever done was with the Stardust probe, which returned material from Comet Wild 2…
Again, these probes just collected samples. Yes, they brought them home, but they cannot and did not perform any analysis on the data. Humans did that. I’m not discounting the importance and achievements of what these probes have done, but imagine, despite all of the great things the Mars rovers have found, what would have been discovered if humans were there instead.
My 3 Euro’s worth…
Warren B. Musselman
There is an old saying… “Man is the measure of all things…” Now I’m not going to comment on the right-ness of that statement, but it’s a truism when you’re talking about the masses. Getting funding for a space program in a democracy requires engaging the masses to a sufficient level that their congress-crooks feel pressured to spend money on it. The only thing that excites people – the non-space-nut people – is a manned program. Hubble is cool and people support it, but it didn’t excite people the way that Apollo did. The Shuttle program got boring really fast because each flight didn’t do much to extend the art, to “go where no man had gone before” and it wasn’t intended to. A new lunar program undertaken with the idea that the goal is going to Mars might just excite people the way that Apollo did.
Warren
Anonymous
Hubble is cool and people support it, but it didn’t excite people the way that Apollo did.
I’ll turn that right around at you, though — ISS is cool, but it didn’t excite people the way HUBBLE did.
Shuttle is cool, but it didn’t excite people the way HUBBLE did.
I’m still trying to figure out what the ISS did vs. Mir or Skylab (other than cost many times as much). Ask 1,000 folks about the shuttle, and they will talk about Challenger or Columbia. They won’t be able to comment with specifics on the science aspect. There have been 119 missions of the shuttle. The best ones? Fixing… HUBBLE. Can anyone name any science that any one of those other missions did? I surely cannot….
Warren B. Musselman
Oh there is no doubt that Hubble is the coolest thing we’ve done since Apollo – and even with the focus screw-up and repair costs associated with it, it’s been the most return on any dollar ever spent in space.
To get the money you need to do impressive space things you have to have a program that the common man can get behind… it takes bodies in space to do that.
Warren
Adrian
Hubble is cool, but for my money the most impressive space achievement since Apollo was Viking. Nobody knew almost anything about the environments the landers had to fly through and land in, yet they worked beautifully. To me, the coolest program for the dollar is a tight race between MER (expensive for Mars, but a very small fraction of Hubble), Pathfinder (pretty cheap) and Stardust (very cheap.) The Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter, combined, were only about 1/4 the cost of MER, and they almost worked. Although “Better, Faster, Cheaper” has been largely discredited because we can’t stand the occasional failures, I’m still a fan of it because it is so effective at teaching the industry how to build spacecraft efficiently. When you have Lockheed Martin, out at Waterton Canyon, building spacecraft after spacecraft, and the same engineer gets to be involved in the whole development cycle of 4 or more different spacecraft, and build in improvements each time, there’s no better way to advance the state of the art.
Not as flashy, but very important is the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter. Check out these pictures (http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/061006_mro_opportunity_victoria.html) of the Opportunity lander from orbit. MRO, in about a year, has returned over 3 terabytes of data from Mars to Earth, even though it’s thousands of times farther from the ground stations Earth than Hubble is. Hubble took more than 10 years to downlink that much data. MRO has fuel to last about 30 years, and will be the cornerstone of Mars exploration for the forseeable future, scouting landing sites, and relaying data in addition to its own science duties. Right now it’s truly the state of the art.
Bruce R. Schaefer
John, no one is dissagreeing with you. BUT it does take a manned space aspect to get the bucks. If people can’t put a human face on it, they won’t pony up. And, YES, it’s been wasteful and, since Apollo, largely ineffective. IF any pertinent scientific progress has been made, then NASA has NOT really publicized it. I agree with everyone else, what they’ve stated is hardly worth the money. It took China forty years or so to orbit, why aren’t they suckered in to the ISS? We lost three astronauts in the Apollo program (Grissom, Chaffee, and White), but so many more in the Shuttle missions, which after the first few flights was pretty much over as far as discovery. We all remember one of the original SEVEN who said, and I paraphrse, “How would you feel sitting on top of the lowest bidder in a government contract?”
Warren B. Musselman
I work with the guy who designed the optics for the HiRISE instrument. He’ll be coming to Oktoberfest. He’s also flown about 2 dozen Nike/Black Brant shots for an XRay telescope he worked on.
Warren
Ken Plattner
Bruce R. Schaefer
Anonymous
Warren B. Musselman
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