Star Trek
August 25th, 2004 - 11:05 pm
Writing about the long-distance controllers NASA’s various robotic probes, George Will notes that
people here know that all their marvels — JPL’s deep-space control center is monitoring 35 space ventures — are performed against a backdrop of deepening public indifference.
That’s as good as argument as any in favor of manned space exploration.
Reading your post, I assumed Will had come to the same conclusion. It just seems so obvious.
He makes it seem like our curiosity about space has disappeared, but our reaction to the Mars probes disproves that. The problem is that you can only hold people’s attention so long with a go kart. We need humans up there.
The sad truth of the matter is best illustrated by the fictional “Apollo 13″, in which Tom Hanks’ (NOT Lovell’s) attempt to televise a demonstration of weightlessness during his lunar mission is pre-empted by networks intent on keeping “I Dream of Jeannie” on schedule…
“Dangerous” missions hold an audience, but successes tend to become boring.
Now, I think what you need is to make the space race a sport again — either with robots or humans. If humans, suit up in distinctive uniforms with colorful logos and corporate sponsors, like NASCAR or the NFL; and race to particular objectives like the Lunar north pole or whatever. If robots, then “Junk Yard Wars” where the probes are landed hundreds of miles apart and must navigate the Martian desert seeking their opponents to drill, saw, spray acid on, and otherwise violently mutually investigate to destruction.
That would fershure make good television. And might make somebody some money.
It MIGHT even, as a side effect, produce some good science.
I know exactly what Will is talking about. I’m an aerospace geek and get excited every day going to the NASA website to peruse that day’s images from the Mars Rovers. This little photo says it all. A shot from the top of a Martian mountain, with plains beyond the rocky outcrop, and at least three lines of mountains in the distance, vanishing in the thin Martian atmospheric haze. This is the stuff of dreams, yet it is happening right NOW, and very few people give a shit.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spirit/20040818a/01-SSS-01-Mosaic-A223R1_br2.jpg
Yep. It may be notable easier/safer/cheaper to explore using machines, the Average Joe (whose tax money pays for it) doesn’t care once the weather comes onto the evening news. We need to have live people doing the exploration if for no other reason than they can come back to earth and go on Leno and tell AJ what it was like to walk on Mars.
That walk on Mars is an end, not a means.
” A nine-day wonder is commonplace on the tenth day”
- Robert Heinlein
Hmmm.
Sorry folks but I disagree with you. Manned missions are a waste of time and money. At least they are until the fundamental questions of how to keep an astronaut’s skeleton from disintegrating from long bouts of zero-G. Oh that and how to keep a complete artificial environment well maintained in one of the harshest environments ever explored.
The simple fact is that there is no good reason for manned missions anywhere. The ISS is a perfect example of wishful thinking over reality. The damn thing cost $100 billion dollars to create and stick into orbit and it costs about $500 million each time we sent a space shuttle up there to deliver new crew members and supplies. It was an idiotic idea and it should be simply shut down. Especially since it hasn’t done a damn thing so far.
No really useful experiments that lead into powerful new technologies. Nothing useful at all in fact. The damn thing is little more than “kick me, I’m an idiot” sign hanging in space.
Until there is an actual reason for manned missions the work should be done by robots. I can’t think of too many different things that robots can’t do just as well lately. And if a mission requires a couple dozen specialized robots, when that’ll still be cheaper and more effective than a manned mission.
And this is coming from a guy who has loved science and space since I was a little kid. I ground my own lenses and mirrors to make my own telescopes. I wired my own radios. But I can still see reality and that is no manned missions.
Frankly if it takes manned missions to keep NASA afloat, then NASA needs to die and ugly messy bloody death right now. If it’s so useless that it is incapable of providing real scientific and/or value inidustrial value, then destroy the buildings, pave the crap over and build a big-ass shopping mall on it’s decayed corpse.
i like that heinlein quote posted earlier. manned missions to get the public excited? most people around at the time can name Neal Armstrong; perhaps fewer will remember Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins (do i have that right)? the point is, who can name any of the astronauts who came after (well, at least before that apollo 13 movie came out)?
frml
Sorry for taking up so much of your ASCII allowance, but here is a subject worthy of some response. And a welcome change from the dismal election fistfighting.
To Ed, even though I disagree, you seem to be speaking as someone for whom the dream of humans escaping the bounds of Earth is precious. So your dismissal of manned space exploration is really a judgment that government has screwed up the job, however well suited it may have been as the initiator?
You may have been following the race for the X-prize, the $10million Ansari prize to the first privately funded group to create a vehicle which can carry a crew of 3 on a suborbital trajectory to space then land safely and repeat the trip with the same vehicle within a two-week period.
For those not familiar with this, the Scaled Composites team lead by Burt Rutan (innovative designer of the canard-wing Long-Eze and the plane that circumnavigated the globe non-stop with no refueling) achieved the first privately funded suborbital flight and successfully landed their vehicle at Mojave, CA on 21 June of this year.
You can read one article about the flight at this URL: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/SS1_touchdown_040621.html
The website for Scaled Composites is: http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/
The link to the Ansari X-Prize press info website is: http://web1-xprize.primary.net/press_room/press_releases/press.php?presstitle=20040727
In many ways, the government has done a lousy job of making us aware of the benefits that have come from the space program generally, and the manned part of that, in particular. The real point, when you get down to it, is to make humans independent of this one single fragile planet. Of course that
Will disappoints me.
He gets the poetry but not the problem: NASA is the problem. They should be in the business of hiring private outfits to get them where they want to go for their research.
Dean (and others):
What would you categorize as “private outfits”? I would like to point to Scaled Composites as a good example of a private effort. I agree with you: they should have some steady source of funding beyond philanthropy and prizes.
Another pointing with pride: JPL, run, managed, and inspired by my college, Caltech (albeit with federal funds). There you have the advantage of a stable set of individuals with free (more or less) consulting from an excellent academic faculty. And a good track record of success (on the average. There will always be mistakes, benign and embarassing).
Perhaps you have in mind some other management model? If so, what?
Regards