> There were good reasons why people were interested in sending people into space in the early days of space exploration. Before automated systems were sufficiently developed, manned programs looked like the best choice. But once automated systems became sufficiently advanced, it was clear that they were the way to go.
This, and it never ceases to baffle me that there are people who still believe that there is some sort of actual, honest, technical reason to put people into things that go into space.
There is one benefit to human spaceflight over robotic spaceflight: the human body is a much more adapted tool to unknown situations than robots are. A human hand is a better manipulator than any robotic tool (look up videos of robots trying to turn a doorknob and open a door, e.g.), and our locomotion tends to be well-adapted to adverse terrain.
But it is far from clear that such versatility is worth all of the costs of human spaceflight, principally the fact that humans are fragile bags of water that require fine-tuned environmental conditions to operate (and such conditions are difficult to provide in space).
> : the human body is a much more adapted tool to unknown situations than robots are.
Here on Earth, that is true.
Everywhere else however, our body is confined to a bulky, heavy, unwieldy space suit, and has exactly as much range of movement as the air supply allows.
And the thing is: We can make better robots. There is clear progress in terms of their capabilities. Not so long ago, [this][1] would only have been possible as CGI, today, it is technical reality.
This rapid path to improvement, simply doesn't exist for biological systems.
If launch becomes sufficiently cheap, then the cost of supporting humans in space also becomes cheap. The cost of developing space robots doesn't decline nearly as much. At some point, "why not robots in space?" has the answer "because on Earth there are plenty of applications where people are cheaper", and cheap space moves that argument to space as well.
Note that this implies the overriding importance of reducing costs vs. just sending people expensively for symbolic reasons. The latter is as idiotic as it has ever been.
I seriously doubt NASA as it is currently funded and constructed can deliver this.
> The cost of developing space robots doesn't decline nearly as much.
Developing Costs wouldn't, but deployment costs would.
If launching becomes cheaper, then, sure, I could launch more space toilets and freeze-dried groceries. Or I could use that capacity to launch more and bigger robots, more often and further. Guess which of these two has a better ROI given the many many many limitations humans have once they leave our Planet, compared to robots.
It doesn't matter how cheap a launch becomes. I have to support an astronaut with food. They have to exercise or their body breaks down in low gravity. I have to let them sleep.
All this is time, payload capacity and energy wasted, that I could instead funnel into more, better, bigger more capable robots.
And, finally: I have to bring astronauts back home safely, unless I want to risk a PR desaster (which is not good for funding). Once I am done with the robot, I can just leave it where it is and sell T-Shirts with its silhouette printed on.
> So, if it were to be as cheap to go into space as to go to St. Louis
Obviously there is a breakpoint at which the cost differential would no longer matter, I agree.
It's just as obvious however, that this breakpoint won't be reached in the near future, or even the forseeable future.
It would require a radically new propulsion technology, which, and this is the sad truth, we don't have. The way we launch rockets today has remained pretty much the same for more than half a century: By burning chemicals in a tube.
As long as that doesn't change, I can pretty much guarantee that the cost differential between doing space-exploration using humans, and doing it with robotic probes, will not look good for good 'ol humans any time soon.
Why is it obvious? Starship, if it succeeds, could reduce launch costs per mass by two orders of magnitude over Falcon 9. For the cost of one SLS launch, Starship, if it meets its cost targets, could launch the mass of a nuclear supercarrier into low earth orbit. The cost to LEO would become similar to the cost of transport to the South Pole.
You will notice we are not using robots at the South Pole.
It could be that for the sort of work we want to do on the south pole a human in a jacket outperforms our current robots, but for the sort of work we want to do on the moon a robot, or our future robot, will outperform a human in a spacesuit.
Good thing the argument wasn't that this will necessarily happen, just that the case can be made that it could happen, and therefore human spacelight is not necessarily a bad idea.
Note that I'm not proposing abandoning robots in space. Your whataboutism assumes a symmetry that's not there.
> just that the case can be made that it could happen, and therefore human spacelight is not necessarily a bad idea
Nuclear war could happen, that doesn't make waging nuclear war a good idea.
> Your whataboutism
Please explain how advocating for useful allocation of resources within a reference topic, without ever leaving said topic, constitutes "whataboutism".
I want space exploration to happen. Right now, the most efficient, most promising, and most fruitful way, including in terms of developing future technology that can one day benefit human spaceflight, is to send robots.
Trying to send people to do a robots work in space exploration right now, is a waste of resources that will, long term, hinder our efforts of becoming a spacefaring species. It doesn't make sense for a tribe that just recently invented small canoues to try and send them across the ocean. It is possible to do so in theory, aka. "it could happen", that doesn't make it a good idea. And every tribe member who drowns during these efforts, is one person less who could father the future inventor of the Galleon.
That’s an argument argument that human spaceflight could, at some point in the future, make sense. Though it’s also likely that automation becomes cheaper in the future. When people are claiming that automation is going to replace many tasks for humans on earth, it’s not much of a stretch to think they would continue to perform better than humans in space, where humans are at a severe disadvantage.
We also have to consider what it is that we actually want people to do up there. A lot of people say “A human could do more science on Mars than a rover!” Leaving aside the fact that we could send multiple rovers for the cost and effort of sending a human, and those rovers would be on the planet much longer - “do science” isn’t a goal. Even the current rover missions have questionable usefulness, which is why there’s always a big celebration when they land, or a discussion about how impressive the engineering is, but extremely little discussion about any of the things they’re learning.
For human spaceflight to be ruled out, automation has to be superior for every worthwhile application of human labor in space, not just some of them. Here on Earth, automation is predicted to increase, but few are predicting it makes human labor useless.
I think greatly advanced automation would improve the argument for humans in space, not refute it, by making it easier to support humans in space.
For all of the things we want to do, automation outperforms humans in space. I pointed this out in my earlier post - this wasn’t the case in the 50’s and early 60’s, so these satellites were planned to be manned (and actually were in the USSR’s case). But automation made much more sense, so the plans changed to unmanned satellites.
Perhaps this could change in the future. But at least in the present, unmanned makes more sense, which is why these things are unmanned. And historically, increased automation has lessened the need for something to be manned (which, is to be expected), so it’s likely the same will be true when it comes to space.
Really? Automation outperforms astronauts for (say) Hubble Telescope Repair? Or for that matter for doing maintenace on robots?
Your assertion only makes sense if the set of activities we do in space is sharply circumscribed. It's a mindset that comes from the "space is extremely expensive" environment.
> Automation outperforms astronauts for (say) Hubble Telescope Repair?
The last hubble repair mission was in 2009. Robotics have come a long way since then. And the Hubble was still pretty close to earth. I can guarantee you that no human hand will ever touch the James Webb telescope ever again. If things go wrong at the 2nd lagrange point, its either robots-to-the-rescue, or bye-bye-telescope.
Comparing a short, limited scope mission, close to earth, to the challenges of doing space things on other planets, is a bit far fetched.
> Your assertion only makes sense if the set of activities we do in space is sharply circumscribed
They are. They have to be, because activities that are not sharply circumscribed, have a very high probability to kill people in space.
> It's a mindset that comes from the "space is extremely expensive" environment
No, it's a mindset that comes from the "space is extremely deadly, and humans are surprisingly fragile outside of the habitat they evolved in" environment.
Your assertion can be reality checked by looking at the proposed private mission to service HST. This mission would use crew to do manual maintenance, not develop robots to try to do the servicing.
Yes, HST is close to Earth. It's still in space. This is a demonstration that when costs of getting the people there are low enough, people > robots.
> This is a demonstration that when costs of getting the people there are low enough, people > robots.
Maintenance missions close to Earth and space exploration are 2 very different tasks. This does in no way "reality check" my assertion that trying to make people live long term on other planetary bodies, or even send them there on limited excursions, makes no sense in todays reality.
You want a reality check? Fine, here is a reality check:
[Perseverance Mission cost][1]: 2.725 Billion $, is already up there doing work, and only the lastest in a line of ever more capable robots.
[2014 Projected Manned Mars Mission Cost][2]: 100 Billion $, could take 20 years or more. That was 10 years ago. Today we know it's likely to be even more expensive and take much longer.
This is the reality. Today, Robots outperform people when it comes to going to other planets, by any scientific or economic metric.
> For human spaceflight to be ruled out, automation has to be superior for every worthwhile application of human labor in space, not just some of them.
This is the case right now. There is not a single activity in space exploration right now, that humans can do better than robots.
> Here on Earth, automation is predicted to increase, but few are predicting it makes human labor useless.
Because here on earth, humans can breathe, eat, drink, piss and poop, without millions of dollars of equipment required to do so.
> There is not a single activity in space exploration right now, that humans can do better than robots.
This is clearly false. If you mean "there is no activity for which a robot could be developed at great expense to do that activity", then that's closer to the truth, but that cost is part of the argument why humans might still do the activity if launch costs are much lower.
> there is no activity for which a robot could be developed at great expense to do that activity
That expense is still orders of magnitude lower than sending humans.
And even IF launch costs go lower (and that's a big if), it wouldn't change the equation: If I can send more into space for my money, then sure, I could launch astronauts and their water supply and space toilets...or I could use that capacity to launch more, bigger, and more capable robots.
So, that explains why the private effort to service the HST wants to send up a robot.
Oh wait. That's totally wrong. They're proposing a mission to send up people to do the maintenance. Because that's far cheaper than developing robots to do it would be.
This, and it never ceases to baffle me that there are people who still believe that there is some sort of actual, honest, technical reason to put people into things that go into space.