Context is everything; the topic was MANNED low earth orbit being no longer needed for national security. Heck, the push nowadays is to also get rid of manned aircraft too.
The Question is who is paying.
In this case taxpayers via NASA.
(I presume Boeing and TheMouthX are paying too, old explorers like Columbus probably received both government support (dictated by Kings) and donations (wealthy individuals).
For Columbus motivated by trying to find a shorter transportation route to good things from the Orient, recall spices came from the Orient/SE Asia by land using pass-along trading until reaching the Atlantic Ocean or by the very long route around Africa.
With ignorance - the American continents got in the way of Columbus. Later an explorer found a way around the bottom of South America, IIRC in secret.)
While any form of travel has its risks, space travel tops the chart (riding atop a somewhat-controlled explosion surely raises your life insurance premiums). Iâm glad to see that with all the issues Starliner has suffered (and probably some we arenât aware of) that they have scrubbed the ship for the astronautâs return.
As for the merits of space travel - many things we have here today are from space exploration technology. Medical breakthroughs and research done in or because of space have helped us âplanet boundâ people. The new Polaris Dawn mission by SpaceX in a couple of days will do a host of experiments and research. Download the Supercluster app for a detailed explanation of the many events. These experiments require human intervention to be performed and can have far-reaching results. I for one am not a fan of a lunar or Mars colony, but Iâm sure few individuals spoke of flying in the 1800âs!
While itâs about a billion years in the future, if we survive and donât find a way off this rock by then, none of it will make any difference. Manned exploration needs to happen if we hope to continue as a species.
The Apollo program was revamped after the Apollo 1 fire and NASA learned from that. Boeing will learn from this and at some point the troubled Starliner will be a distant memory. We need to âclimb the mountainâ because it is there.
Itâs not a this or that thing but a mix of what is smart/reasonable/popular determining what to spend space dollars on. My money is on space based (orbit and moon) observatories as well as learning to live in appropriately sized communities firstly on Luna or at colonies (RAMA comes to mind) in local orbit. Robotic probes to our neighbour planets is vital if weâre to understand our solar system and needs boosting even though itâs not as sexy as a manned presence. Time to take a rational look at costs and knowledge gains.
The first human born off Earth will be an Extraterrestial by definition. Probably a âLunarâ, Selenar" or maybe just a âMoonieâ. Could also be an âOrbiterâ. Home to these humans is not the same as for us. Exciting times indeed!
With todayâs advances in sensors, it makes ZERO sense to fly for a business meeting or for a great majority in administrivia to work in an office.
There are thousands of books and hundreds of documentary videos on the topic of Yellowstone National park. There is nothing to glean by going there that you canât read in a book, watch on video or even experience in virtual reality.
Yet visitors to Yellowstone spent over $800 million in 2023 visiting the park. Why in the world would the populous spend $800 million for something they could have gotten for free with a library card and a few YouTube videos?
When you can answer that question, you might be able to explain the urge to send people to space.
âWhen you can answer that questionâ
Selling the family on a 2 day drive to see Yellowstone is easy.
Selling the family on a 2 year isolated ride to a moon of Jupiter to see a Sulphur pool for $800 million per person is probably a ânoâ.
What are you selling and why the need to sell it when you can everything you need for free from a book?
So Robert, You taking your kids on a private submarine trip down to see the Titanic in person this Labor Day vacation or seeing the exhibit in the local museum?
So AJ, youâve now changed your mind? Which is it: explore or not to explore?
They were discovering the rudimentary nature of space and evaluating human compatibility with a previously unexplored and unexperienced dimension. They learned enough to allow us to get to the moon, find out if it was made of cheese or something firm that would support a spacecraft and come back. That was the exploration equivalent of 15th and 16th century explorers looking for resources to plunder. But exploration now is also about examining the things we take for granted on terra firma, like which way do the roots of a plant grow in microgravity? How do the characteristics of a superconductor change when in zero-g? Do epoxy resins form stronger bonds without gravity? Does cancer cell metabolism slow in prolonged low gravity?
Sensor technology has already surpassed human sensing capability, but sensing is not the same as perception and human intuition makes for much higher efficiency and productivity when experimenting and learning and redesigning an experiment on the fly.
I think that to propose that an army of robots can establish and execute an asteroidal mining operation without any human presence requires at least a similar operation on benign earth that serves as proof of concept. Is there?
Robots are perfect for far away basic discovery. Not only do you save money and size and complexity of the vehicle, but you donât subject people to the mindlessness of sitting in a capsule for perhaps years at a stretch. As said, weâre already automating most systems here on earth and ALL systems that explore extreme environments are now done by robots.
Sending people into deadly environments is not needed and is probably prohibited by all civilized nations.
Who/what performs the maintenance, troubleshooting and repair of the robots?
Arthur you have a serious need to do some research as to the militarization of Low earth orbit and the commercialization of the same. If you think there is No national security value to maintaining a commanding presence in LEO then you have buried you head in the proverbial sand. Think of the followingâŚWeather sats. Communication sats. Geoscience sats. Surface mappingâŚyou think Google earth and all those sat images came from nowhere? I will not even bother with the REAL imagining stuff.
Robots. And its robots, all the way down.
Iâve seen robots assemble robots. Do you have any examples of robots diagnosing a robot on the ânot working rightâ heap and then performing the repair? (And the repaired robot works, and doesnât look like Frankenstein)
Humans canât be assured of not incurring injury while standing still (ever see a soldier standing at attention too long just keel over and crack his skull?) never mind zipping along at close to the speed of sound. So jet flight at 39,000 ft should be out of the question, eh?
âSo jet flight at 39,000 ft should be out of the question, eh?â
It proves that to do so you have to be surrounded with technology, supported by a massive earth-based infrastructure, thousands of unseen workers making it possible, and even then you are limited to just several hours.
Try occupying the sea floor near Antarctica to get an idea how much technology you need and how you would not live without all the people and supplies required daily to keep you alive there. Thatâs peanuts compared to whatâs needed for people to go to dead cold planets.
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