The Creature That Ate Nasa Takes Another Big Bite Options

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

I agree with Peter59's main point. The government has made it clear (with justification) that there will be no more money for NASA as a whole than there is now, which means that what it's getting should be spent as productively as possible -- and that means a huge deemphasis of manned flight and an increased share of funding for unmanned missions, whose scientific and economic productvitity has always been tremendously greater and will continue to be for decades to come. Comments on the relatively huge sums spent on defense, Katrina, etc. are irrelevant -- quite apart from the fact that those are usually a hell of a lot more justifiable in sane terms.

This will no doubt open me up once again to the accusation that, if you cut out funding for manned spaceflight, spending for unmanned spaceflight will also be obliterated. I remain skeptical of this. There have always been three reasons for NASA spending: concrete benefits, public enthusiasm, and flat-out pork. The first one will of course continue to be provided by unmanned programs to the same extent it already is -- and, in fact, the total concrete return from NASA will greatly increase once the white elephant of unnecessary manned flight is lifted off its back. As for the second: I've noted before that the public seems to be more interested in the actual results from the more generally interesting unmanned missions (Hubble, the MERs, Voyager) than it is from the manned missions -- and switching over from ISS to a manned lunar program won't change that. (The Moon, let's face it, is a very dull place.) And as for space pork: the Congressmen who want that for their districts will want it no matter what form it's in: manned or unmanned projects. I have no doubt that eliminating NASA's manned programs would lead to a nosedive in overall funding for the agency (which I have no objection to), but I still think that total spending on its unmanned programs would actually go up to some degree.


And, yes, the ISS is a useless atrocity and always has been; every bit of the $100 billion the US actually has spent on it has been flushed right down the toilet -- and the "experiments" that the US actually has conducted on it have been every bit as useless and ridiculous as the Russian Suitsat. The only thing that's keeping it going at this point (as NASA realized and planned from the start, when they deliberately and ridiculously lowballed their initial cost estimates for it) is the fact that legislators don't want to admit that they were wrong in supporting the thing previously and will therefore keep flushing more money down the same toilet until absolute disaster comes or those particular legislators retire, whichever comes first. That's just the way the game is played in any conceivable human system of governance. (Gravity Probe B is seriously questionable on grounds of scientific cost-effectiveness -- which is why it almost got cancelled several times -- but it shines like a nova compared to the ISS, the Shuttle or the Apollo program by that standard.)

[djellison]

switching over from ISS to a manned lunar program won't change that.  (The Moon, let's face it, is a very dull place.)

I very much doubt that. There's a generation and a half of people who have lived in a time when no one walked on the moon - me included. People of my age +/-10 years (17 - 37) will be watching the first of these new mission, and experiencing something very similar to that of those fortunate enough to have been alive in 1967. This may be ground already covered for many, but for younger people - this is our Apollo and it excites me greatly.

Doug

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

People of my age +/-10 years (17 - 37) will be watching the first of these new missions, and experiencing something very similar to that of those fortunate enough to have been alive in 1967. 

But that's the point -- they'll be watching the FIRST of those missions. Unless they turn up something interesting to the general public -- which ain't gonna happen on the Moon, unless we're lucky enough to dig up any Black Monoliths -- they won't be watching the second, or the third, or the fourth... Lest we forget, a few minutes before the Apollo 13 accident, the public was griping to the networks about having their soap operas interrupted by the latest broadcast from the Command Module. And they went back to griping about it with Apollo 14. I myself watched every second of lunar surface TV coverage from Apollos 14 and 15 -- about 18 hours of the latter. But we are the rare exceptions. (And after that even I got sufficiently bored to tune out a lot of the time with Apollos 16 and 17 -- although, of course, I made sure to catch the lunar liftoffs.) Since the general public is footing the bill for space, the general public has every right to decide whether it's worth spending that amount of money just for pure entertainment. (And the same thing is true for the unmanned part of the space program.)

[ljk4-1]

But that's the point -- they'll be watching the FIRST of those missions.  Unless they turn up something interesting to the general public -- which ain't gonna happen on the Moon, unless we're lucky enough to dig up any Black Monoliths -- they won't be watching the second, or the third, or the fourth...  Lest we forget, a few minutes before the Apollo 13 accident, the public was griping to the networks about having their soap operas interrupted by the latest broadcast from the Command Module.  And they went back to griping about it with Apollo 14.  I myself watched every second of lunar surface TV coverage from Apollos 14 and 15 -- about 18 hours of the latter.  But we are the rare exceptions.  (And after that even I got sufficiently bored to tune out a lot of the time with Apollos 16 and 17 -- although, of course, I made sure to catch the lunar liftoffs.)  Since the general public is footing the bill for space, the general public has every right to decide whether it's worth spending that amount of money just for pure entertainment.  (And the same thing is true for the unmanned part of the space program.)

Back in the Apollo days, I believe the thought was that those pioneering missions were just the first of what was going to become routine in a matter of years:
Sending humans on a regular basis to the Moon to explore and eventually colonize it. Heck, you could probably have your next vacation there, too!

When I was a kid, I was certain that we'd have bases on the Moon and Mars by the year 2000. And look at the film 2001: A Space Odyssey - a manned expedition to Jupiter by 2001 was not considered a wild idea.

So in addition to a public that then as now was not generally science educated, the thinking may have gone along the lines of watching airplanes take off and land at an airport - kinda neat at first, but after a while it looks like the same old thing.

Of course little did we know what was planned for the US space program, at least until 1972 or so.

Now in the decades after Star Wars and The Matrix and way too many additions to the Star Trek franchise, will the youth of today and the near tomorrow care about real manned expeditions to the Moon and Mars? Or will it be too long and boring for them, full of all that science and engineering stuff?

The big question is, what can WE do about that?

[dvandorn]

...The big question is, what can WE do about that?

If you're asking Bruce that question, the answer is obviously "Why would you want to do anything about that? There's not ever been a reason for a human being to go into space, not when robots can do it much more cheaply, safely and effectively. Sit on the sidelines and shut up -- when it comes to exploring new worlds, your human presence is less than worthless."

I grant you, I disagree with that sentiment in the strongest possible terms. But that's basically what he's saying.

-the other Doug

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Well, yeah; basically, that IS what I'm saying -- at least for now, and for a long time to come. The thing is simply that when you're exploring or doing anything else in Earth orbit or on the Moon, it's tremendously cheaper and more efficient to it using telepresence -- and when you get farther away, at distance where the radio time lag does start seriously interfering with the ability to control robots from Earth, the difficulty and cost of sending humans out so far also skyrockets compared with the cost of simply putting them into orbit or sending them to the Moon. Even assuming that we never break the lightspeed barrier for a communcations link (which we probably won't), it will be a long time before we find anything out there which is both very difficult to investigate by slow-acting robots and scientifically valuable enough to justify the gigantic costs of manned deep-space travel. Nor am I the only one saying this; Freeman Dyson, for instance, has elaborated on the problem at considerable length.

As for the emotional impact of actually sending humans out there rather than machines: just how big is that? I myself have never thought that the emotional experience of exploring the Solar System was enhanced in the least by having -- in Tom Lehrer's immortal phrase -- "some clown" waving in the foreground. This may just indicate that I'm unusually antisocial (which I am) -- but I don't think I'm THAT unusual. Bruce Sterling did an article for "Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine" about 15 years ago pointing out that the New Generation accepts the idea of telepresence far more casually than previous people do -- touristing with your eyes and mind, without necessarily lugging your entire body along -- and as the quality of telepresence and long-distance communcations steadily improves, this will simply become more prevalent. He concluded that telepresence will be more and more accepted by people as the best way to explore beyond the Earth too, even from the tourist point of view. After all, we'll be able to send our senses of sight and (where there's an atmosphere) hearing there with extreme fidelity; and our senses of smell and touch are simply irrelevant on worlds with no air or poisonous air, and surfaces either too hot or too cold for a human ever to touch with his bare skin. Come to think of it, C.S. Lewis wrote a poem back in the 1950s pointing out precisely that about the experience of manned space travel, and ending:

From prison, in a prison, we fly;
There's no way into the sky.

So: just what does it mean for humans to "go into space"? Do you have to lug your entire fragile, awkward, expensive-to-preserve body along, or can you say that humans have gone into space when they just send their minds and their senses there?

[dvandorn]

Bruce, it is simply not possible to send more than one basic sense (and that is sight) away from us. We cannot smell the plume of Enceladus; we cannot feel the crunch of Meridiani's blueberry pavement under our feet; we cannot hear the low rumble of the winds as they blow God-knows-what particles into linear dunes on Titan.

All we can do is see. And at that, we can see "something-close-to-maybe-something-like-the-color-you-would-see-with-your-own-eyes-had-we-not-actually-decided-to-leave-green-out-of-all-of-our-images." Sort of.

Maybe only twelve people walked on the Moon. But those people interpreted that experience, however effectively they could, and communicated to the rest of us what it felt like. What the lower gravity did to them as they bounded across the dusty slopes. How the moondust gave them stuffy noses and smelled like burnt gunpowder.

They communicated the realization of their presence on another world.

I had seen pictures from Surveyor and Luna, but as even Neil Armstrong has said, his experience of actually *being* there showed him, in so many myriad ways, how subtly different the surface was from the pictures, how the conditions were replete with their own nuances -- nuances that are completely missed by cameras.

So, OK -- through Surveyor, *one* of my senses was (partially, and not completely effectively) transported to the Moon. So, I was on the Moon.

Not.

Hell, *two* of my senses were transported (quite a bit more effectively) to Detroit today, when I watched the Superbowl on TV. So, I was at the Superbowl.

Not.

On the day that I can hook my brain into a machine that feeds *every* one of my senses (including my internal body sensations) from a *completely* accurate simulacrum located on another world, that can give me *instant* feedback to *exactly* how moving and working on that world feels, sounds, smells, tastes and appears -- on that day, *maybe* "telepresence" will be good enough.

But, then again, maybe not. Because, in the final analysis, when asked if I (or anyone at all) had actually *been* there, I would have to say...

Not.

-the other Doug

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

You will never be able to know how being on the Moon smells, tastes or feels (except for the low gravity) -- because you will never be able to use any of those senses on it. Nor will you be able to use your ears (although you would at least be able to use those on worlds which have an atmosphere). As for the "visual nuances" of being on the Moon: may I suggest the obvious point that that is because the first robotic TV cameras to land there were rather crappy compared with what we have now? (As the MER photos have shown us in no uncertain terms.) And cameras will go on getting better. I myself have never had any trouble visualizing the experience of being on another world through the medium of a robot rather than another human being -- and while obviously not everyone agrees with me on this, a lot of other people do.

Once again, let us look at the polls. The American people consistently say that they would favor a new manned lunar program if its total cost was "less than a billion dollars" -- which is to say they don't favor one. And unless we can come up with some argument for it other than entertainment, they have every right to say that they don't want their taxes used to provide them with that particular kind of entertainment.

[ljk4-1]

What if we could combine the best of humans and machines to allow a presence on other worlds exceeding anything that either alone could accomplish and sense.

There is also the possibility of genetically engineering humans to survive in all sorts of extraterrestrial environments.

Reinventing Humanity

Ray Kurzweil

02/03/2006
*************************

Ray Kurzweil sees a radical
evolution of the human species in
the next 40 years. The merger of man
and machine, coupled with the sudden
explosion in machine intelligence
and rapid innovation in gene
research and nanotechnology, will
result in a world where there is no
distinction between the biological
and the mechanical, or between
physical and virtual reality.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/artRedirec...rtID=635&m=7610


*************************
Technology and Human Enhancement

John Smart

02/03/2006
*************************

Machines are increasingly exceeding
us in the performance of more and
more tasks, from guiding objects
like missiles or satellites to
assembling other machines. They are
merging with us ever more intimately
and are learning how to reconfigure
our biology in new and significantly
faster technological domains.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/artRedirec...rtID=637&m=7610


“Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not destined to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is destined to remain a tadpole.”

- William Burroughs

[Mongo]

The thing is simply that when you're exploring or doing anything else in Earth orbit or on the Moon, it's tremendously cheaper and more efficient to it using telepresence -- and when you get farther away, at distance where the radio time lag does start seriously interfering with the ability to control robots from Earth, the difficulty and cost of sending humans out so far also skyrockets compared with the cost of simply putting them into orbit or sending them to the Moon.  Even assuming that we never break the lightspeed barrier for a communcations link (which we probably won't), it will be a long time before we find anything out there which is both very difficult to investigate by slow-acting robots and scientifically valuable enough to justify the gigantic costs of manned deep-space travel.  Nor am I the only one saying this; Freeman Dyson, for instance, has elaborated on the problem at considerable length.

I entirely agree with this. With a fairly small fraction of the enormous pile of money needed to mounted a manned Mars mission, I am quite sure that we could develop highly capable autonomous robots roughly equal to a human geologist (at least with regards to finding interesting rocks to sample -- the human would likely be ahead in terms of mobility, but the robot would have better multi-spectral vision, not to mention far superior long-term endurance). And once the technology has been developed (at much lower cost than developing the full human-capable system, in my opinion), for the price of a single manned mission, you could send dozens or scores of these robotic prospectors, which could stay operational on site for years or even decades, instead of months for humans.

The big counter-argument that I always hear is that without a manned program, funding for the unmanned program will dry up. I don't buy this. The example that is used is the years between Skylab and the first Shuttle flights, when money for new unmanned starts almost vanished. This is certainly true -- I remember getting very frustrated at the lack of new unmanned spacecraft at the time -- but I think that the primary culprit at the time was the huge amount of money being squandered on Shuttle development, part of which was diverted from the unmanned budget. If NASA had been content with ELVs, there would have been much more unmanned exploration.

The type of projects started near the end of the Apollo/Skylab era (Viking, Voyager, Pioneer Venus), continued over the next decade, would have left us well ahead of where we were when NASA finally started flying unmanned probes again.

Unfortunately, the manned program has always been driven far more by politics than by science, so I fully expect that unmanned exploration will be starved of funds for the forseeable future.

Bill

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Well, it certainly has been in today's budget -- the total NASA science budget has been knocked down way below what was expected in order to keep funding the steadily increasing money demands of both Shuttle/ISS and Bush's manned lunar program. The Planetary Society is already raising hell ( http://www.planetary.org/about/press/relea...ty_Charges.html ) -- but what did any of you expect? Ever since the Moon Race ended, the space program's chief reason for existence has been as a pork farm. You are all going to have to decide whether you want that pork to exist in the form of robots that at least do some useful work, or as a bunch of Tom Lehrer's spacesuited "clowns" waving pointlessly from places that could be better explored at 1% of the cost by robots. Those are the only alternatives you have.

[Holder of the Tw...]

I very much doubt that.  There's a generation and a half of people who have lived in a time when no one walked on the moon - me included. People of my age +/-10 years (17 - 37) will be watching the first of these new mission, and experiencing something very similar to that of those fortunate enough to have been alive in 1967.  This may be ground already covered for many, but for younger people - this is our Apollo and it excites me greatly.

Doug

Doug, I'm sorry, but my generation (I was 14 years old for Apollo 11) was unique. Those of us 47+ remember when earth was all there was, and all else was science fiction. For those older than 11, who could truly comprehend what was happening, there was an I-can't-believe-this-is-really-happening aspect to it. Those particular feelings are never to be repeated, and are hard to explain to those of you who grew up with manned moon landings as history.

With regards to manned space flight, there is no scientific justification, I agree. However, I think it is justified if the clear goal is to establish permanent, independent, growing, and viable human colonies off the earth. I think the moon is excluded (except as a source of raw material) since the gravity there is unlikely to support even one generation of viable humans.

Now back to DAWN. I got concerned when they dropped the LIDAR, and later thought dropping the magnetometer was close to criminal. Now look at it! Someone on this thread earlier suggested taking it away from the PI's and putting it on the auction block for someone else to use. I'm partial to that idea, even going so far as NASA selling it to some other space agency, as long as it goes to Ceres and Vesta. Maybe a re-funded mission could at least get the magnetometer back, too.

This would serve the purpose of getting the mission accomplished, not wasting the investment already made, and STILL discouraging anyone else from deliberately understating costs in the future. I doubt many researchers will be anxious to blow their cost caps when they know someone will take their baby from them.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0602/06nasabudget/ :

"To make up the projected shuttle shortfall, 'we took a couple of billion out of science and a billion and a half out of the exploration line and made up what we needed to make up,' Griffin said...

" Today, a reporter asked the administrator, 'last September you said that not one thin dime would be taken away from the science programs for human spaceflight and exploration. Is what you just said, that that's exactly what has been done, not just one thin dime but two billion dollars taken away from space science to complete the ISS?'

" 'Yep, that's right,' Griffin said with his usual candor. 'I wish we hadn't had to do it, I didn't want to, but that's what we needed to do.' "

______________________________________

Well, the Washington Post said about a month ago that this was coming -- the White House, after a ferocious internal debate, had decided that they didn't dare offend the Congressional powers in Texas and Florida (the former because of their then-predominance in GOP Congressional leadership posts, the latter because it's a big and politically close state) by making any cuts in Shuttle/ISS. And so it goes... Rationality is usually unlikely in political administrations, and it's even more so than usual in this one.

[The Messenger]

I think we should just de-annex Texas and give it back to Mexico - Manned Space Program and all. Texan's keep leading us into wars they don't know how to end.

[vexgizmo]

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