Manned spaceflight is not the only sexy technology.
Fine. Show how these programs created returns that could not have been created through unmanned flight or investment in other areas.EI_Sparks said:No it isn't. It is highly unreasonable (because it ignores historical fact) to insist that the manned space programme does not raise interest in science and engineering, create jobs, promote technological and scientific progress and return far more than any other government programme per dollar invested.
It feels more like debating with a wall. You have no idea of what's involved in the programme, yet you feel fully qualified to give over-arching statements stateing why it cannot possible work and how it cannot possibly be worth the investment, and that that investment cannot possibly be funded and that there's no possible way that that funding can be found by cutting military spending.Undecided said:I refuse to talk to someone who is debating with himself. I have never said that there was no opportunities in space. What I am saying is that the US can't afford, and you have yet to show me where the US will get these funds? You are debating with a mirror not with me.
No, you didn't make it up, the office of budget control did and they're the ones I was referring to in that sentence.I didn't make that $1 trillion up, look at the thread please. Your going in circles Sparks. These issues have already been dealt with.
How do you know? Do you really think any politician would be publicly advocating that in an election year when the incumbant has been spouting so much garbage about possible threats? The only one who could is Clark, and he can only do it because he was the head of NATO until recently.Dean does not support cutting the military budget
Don't be daft. The fact is that China's not seen as a real threat. And Bush is most certainly not doing this in response to them, either for real or for effect. He's doing it to be seen as a "visionary" and nothing more. China might not exist and he'd still have done this. You want to know why this went ahead? Because of the positive feedback they got in polls when they floated this balloon just before the 100th anniversary of powered flight speech.This is something that I did not deny, I said that this moon program wouldn't even exist without the tacit Chinese plans for the moon. If it wasn't the moon and China it would have probably been a new war. You cannot logically deny the influence of China's ambitions for the US going back.
Stalinist is the correct term and implies central planning, a feature also seen in the US - and so saying Central Planning is not only inaccurate, but misleading.No not Stalinist, that is rhetorical please Central Planned.
Nope, that's not what's being endorsed.Which you and Mr.F are endorsing, spending HUGE amounts of government money to prop up a economy
No, but it is the sexiest. As shown by the correllation between the space programme's activity level and the number of engineering and science graduates produced.hypewaders said:Manned spaceflight is not the only sexy technology.
No thanks. That's been done. It takes several books to cover fully, and even then it's only possible to show what returns the programme created - it's totally impossible to prove that those returns could not have been created by investment in other areas, random brilliant ideas, or flying pigs from venus. It is, in other words, a misleading and disingenous question which in fact does not have a valid answer of any kind. A politician's favorite kind of question I suppose - but I'm not a politician, I'm an engineer. And as I'm not being paid to type here, I'll just point you towards amazon.com and let you read. I suggest you start with :Persol said:Fine. Show how these programs created returns that could not have been created through unmanned flight or investment in other areas.
Persol said:I don't see any return worth the amount of money we've dumped into the manned space program.
"I think very little in the way of enduring value is going to come out of putting man on the moon," said Philip Abelson, director of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory and editor of Science. "We would have put in a lot of engineering talent and research and wound up being the laughing stock of the world." Abelson made his remarks in 1963.
The most misleading of the arguments is the one having to do with cost. The number being batted around ? $1 trillion ? was apparently pulled by someone from the thin vacuum of space. It is a made-up number. A fabrication. It apparently derives from the half-trillion dollars NASA (kicking up its heels in delight) estimated would be the cost of a gold-plated moon base and trip to Mars when George H. W. Bush proposed it in 1989. Someone, somewhere, applied some goofy mathematical spinning to the price of NASA's 1989 wish list and came up with the $1 trillion figure. It's worth remembering that NASA didn't get its wish list. The president's proposal would increase NASA's budget by very little.
So the half-ton of samples brought back were of little scientific use?hypewaders said:Sparks, it's preposterous to say what we now know about Luna would still be mysterious without manned landings: like saying we wouldn't fly airplanes without the Wright Bros.
Indeed - but to say that it did not do real science is to deny reality. To say it brought no economic benefits is also denying reality.Apollo was a Giant Leap, but was more bravado than science.
Sure - if you know exactly what you need to do, exactly where the environment is (remember, even today they don't know where Spirit is to more than a few hundred feet in accuracy), and what that environment is like. If you want to try to land on an asteroid that's ten light-minutes away or more by telepresence, you'll have to find a way to get around the delay imposed by the speed of light. I believe you'll find it's more economical to actually go there instead....We are on the cusp of an explosion of our understanding of the macro and micro universe by casting off direct presence. Even for save-the-planet asteroid nudges, unmanned gets any job out there done better, faster, and more cost-effectively.
Nope. It's not romanticism when you know the realities of what's involved. The fact is, a manned space programme with a definite goal is an asset in and of itself. But it produces more than you put into it. It is, in other words, highly practical - if you run it right, ie. a set goal, a set deadline, and a realistic budget, and noone coming in half-way through and changing all three things (which is how the shuttle came to be such a disaster).Sparks, I think your romanticism is clouding your reason.
Okay, I'll name the second-biggest I can think of (the biggest is the NEA threat, but people seem to get this vision in their head of Bruce Willis when you try to rationally discuss that).Otherwise, you should be able to name here a specific area of knowledge, that only manned spaceflight can accomplish now and in future, and why telepresence is inadequate or inferior for that mission.
Indeed. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not arguing here for a manned space programme at the expense of the unmanned one (that'd be a bit odd from somone whose job is robotics research). I'm saying that we don't yet have the technology to replace a human in the control loop at the site.Come on, all spaceflight depends vitally on automation and creative application of automation to new circumstance.
Actually, Mars is a highly dynamic environment where machinery is in serious trouble if the weather kicks up. Spirit is probably going to be lucky - previous landers haven't been. The russian Mars 2 lander never made it to the surface because of a dust storm and Mars 3 was shut down within 20 seconds of starting up when it landed by the same storm. Meanwhile, Mariner 9 was denied any view of the surface by that storm for nine months.There are few environments as static as the Moon, asteroids, and to a lesser extend Mars.
No it can't. And before you say it, that's not a sweeping statement, that's the result of two years of my research work as well as the result of a few hundred other people working on the same problem. Autonomous robotics has limits. Yes, you can say "go here and don't bump into something", but you can't say "go here and clean that solar panel off and handle any problems that come up in the meantime".Autonomy can easily make up for time lag
Maintainance.Please explain one important construction task that is impossible robotically
Entirely possible - but the math's the same whether your robot is a COTS unit or a custom-built jalopy made from titanium and aluminium by JPL's finest.You've been spending too long around junk.
So I spend seven years working in a research lab and I'm a technophobe?Space is an indefensibly expensive and unforgiving place for technophobes.