What is the deal with all the astronaut stuff we are getting?

[DeTess]

I wanted to make a quick comment regarding that statement that 'human spaceflight is irrelevant because all real science is done by robots or remotely controlled missions' I've seen some people make.

It is true that most science focusing on other planets is indeed done by unmanned missions, but this is because its the only option we have right now, not because it is a superior option (it isn't). A manned mission would be able to achieve far more in far less time because it isn't limited by things like bandwidth and communications lag. Heck, a manned mission to mars could do in a month what'd take a remote mission years without even landing, simply by being able to take far more direct control of one of the mars rovers.

However, we currently lack either the technology (for sending manned mission past mars) or the funding (though that is lowly being fixed) to send humans much further than low earth orbit right now. That's not a problem solved by giving up on human spaceflight altogether, though.

[Tyndmyr]

This isn’t the fault of the space program, and says nothing about anything, other than the apathy of some college students.

At ten years after the moon landing, NBC conducted a poll to see how people felt about it. The majority opinion was "the costs didn't justify it, so we shouldn't have gone"

It took until the 25 year mark to get opinions to get to an even split. That's, uh, not a lot of enthusiasm. One in three people in the US still can't even name the first man to walk on the moon.

A *lot* of people do not find space to be inherently fascinating. It's perfectly fine and wonderful to feel differently, but we can't reasonably deny that many people do not view space as particularly exciting.

So, bringing it back to why we're seeing more of it now...it's easier to film now. Sci-Fi stuff *used* to be notoriously expensive to film, but CGI has come a long way.

[Anonymouswizard]

Sci-Fi stuff *used* to be notoriously expensive to film, but CGI has come a long way.

Weirdly I liked the compromises expensive filming forced on sci-fi, particularly the slower pace and need to write around what they can show (and the consequences when they didn't).

[Fyraltari]

So, bringing it back to why we're seeing more of it now...it's easier to film now. Sci-Fi stuff *used* to be notoriously expensive to film, but CGI has come a long way.

Weirdly I liked the compromises expensive filming forced on sci-fi, particularly the slower pace and need to write around what they can show (and the consequences when they didn't).

Spoiler: All tremble before the dreaded zarbi!

Show

[Tyndmyr]

Weirdly I liked the compromises expensive filming forced on sci-fi, particularly the slower pace and need to write around what they can show (and the consequences when they didn't).

Sometimes limitations make for good stuff.

Space Odyssey 2001, while not my favorite film, most definitely had some fairly impressive tricks used for the era. I have no idea how that movie would be filmed today, and I'm honestly not even sure that it could be made today, but you've definitely got to respect some of the sci fi accomplishments.

[Anonymouswizard]

Spoiler: All tremble before the dreaded zarbi!

Show

Ah, classic DW. Sometimes I enjoy in the way it was intended (The Daleks), other times in unintended ways (The Web Planet). It's amazing how many convincing monsters you can make out of bubble wrap, foam, and good acting (heck, in the Troughton years they sometimes didn't even use the first two).

[Caledonian]

A manned mission would be able to achieve far more in far less time because it isn't limited by things like bandwidth and communications lag.

Manned missions are limited by other things, like the need for life support and the duration of radiation exposure.

Besides, we've done them. It was only on the very last mission to the Moon that they sent any actual scientists, and they didn't get to do much science. The majority of our scientific understanding of the Moon came from probes. The stuff the astronauts collected could have been collected by a telepresence probe far more cheaply and efficiently, and actual scientists could have done the selection - rather than military pilots given crash courses in geology. Sending people to Mars is out of the question unless it's accepted to be a one-way mission - currently, we could send people there and bring them back and the last of them would be dying of radiation poisoning as they returned.

[Anonymouswizard]

Maybe the 'possible life on Venus' hypothesis is going to lead to a space fiction boom? I guess it depends on how long people are talking about it for.

[Delicious Taffy]

I guess it depends on how long people are talking about it for.

Give it four days and nobody will be talking about Venus. It's a nothing story.

[Ramza00]

Maybe the 'possible life on Venus' hypothesis is going to lead to a space fiction boom? I guess it depends on how long people are talking about it for.

Have you seen the XKCD that is Venus relevant?

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
At ten years after the moon landing, NBC conducted a poll to see how people felt about it. The majority opinion was "the costs didn't justify it, so we shouldn't have gone"

Public apathy is not a measure of the inherent value of anything.

Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
One in three people in the US still can't even name the first man to walk on the moon.

One in three people probably can’t name a lot of things in this country, but that’s a reflection of the dripping mess that’s our educational system, not of the value of human spaceflight.

Originally Posted by Tyndmyr
Sci-Fi stuff *used* to be notoriously expensive to film, but CGI has come a long way.

CGI isn’t cheap. Look at the section for visual effects staff in the credits of any recent SF movie. They all need salaries and workspace, among other things.

And visual effects aren’t the only expense for a movie, no matter if it's set on Mars or Middle-Earth. Costumes, props, maquettes, concept art, countless other things. Simply using CGI in place of physical models doesn’t automatically make a movie less expensive.

[DeTess]

Sending people to Mars is out of the question unless it's accepted to be a one-way mission - currently, we could send people there and bring them back and the last of them would be dying of radiation poisoning as they returned.

Everything else you mentioned is a problem of the implementation of manned missions (life support tech, which people went, etc.) Not the concept of manned missions themselves.

I wanted to highlight the snippet above because I happen to know that it is incorrect. Several fairly feadible concepts for sending astronauts on a return trip without dying from radiation already exist. Of course you can't send them there with a dragon or soyouz capsule, but that doesn't mean we lack the technology to do so at all.

[Tyndmyr]

Public apathy is not a measure of the inherent value of anything.

We're not looking for some inherent value of the "worthiness" of spaceflight, we're asking why people do or don't make fiction about it.

Public apathy is highly relevant to that.

Cost to make something relatively to number of potential viewers is central to what films get made.

CGI isn’t cheap. Look at the section for visual effects staff in the credits of any recent SF movie. They all need salaries and workspace, among other things.

CGI has gotten significantly cheaper and better. Basic stuff like compositing can be done at home by an enthusiast, and is so frequently used in films now that it's not even really considered a special effect now. It used to require an absolute ton of work, and now you toss up a green/blue screen and chromakey the video feeds, it's trivial.

A lot of the money spent now is spent on things that simply could not have been done at all a couple decades ago.

[Caledonian]

We're not looking for some inherent value of the "worthiness" of spaceflight, we're asking why people do or don't make fiction about it.

Public apathy is highly relevant to that.

Yes, but we've also seen that there's a small number of very enthusiastic fans of the manned space program. Maybe they're aiming for a niche audience.

[WinterKnight404]

I'm disappointed in most of you. There have been some exciting developments in the future of space flight recently and you think it's pointless and boring? I don't know where to begin... I'm not a huge NASA nerd and pretend to understand everything but I find all the developments fascinating.

Most recently:
Space X achieves the first manned commercial space flight to the ISS with it's Dragon capsule. It's the first manned space launch from the USA in decades...

More probes are making their way to Mars including one with a flying drone on board which would be a first for mankind to have a device in the air to map out terrain.

The search for other planets that could either support human life or an advanced alien civilization is ramping up epically with some scientists predicting that with our new technology we will find evidence of alien life within this next decade.

Trump created the Space Force. No matter how misguided his reasoning may be this is something we will eventually need. I doubt that this is really the time for it but hey, it's a start.

Why it's important:
The future IS SPACE. A new great space race is about to begin (or maybe has) between China, the US, Russia, UAE and the EU. Corporations will WANT to go to space to harvest raw materials. Space tourism will occur as space travel becomes safer and more commercial.

As others have said we need to get off of this rock to prevent an extinction level event from wiping out all of humanity and the more planets we colonize the lower that probability goes.

[Ramza00]

I'm disappointed in most of you.

Well I am disappointed in that people starve in a world of 7 billion people where we plant and grow enough food to feed everyone yet we do not have the will to distribute the food to everyone. Literally letting food "perish" with food waste, literally spilling milk on the ground for we decide we want a consistent minimum price on the part of farmers. So much disapointment.

But more seriously, if people have differences of opinion, and are strangers, you are not going to change their mind by telling them you are disappointed in them or that they should be ashamed of themselves (not something you did it is just a similar thing other people do from time to time.)

Why it's important:
The future IS SPACE. A new great space race is about to begin (or maybe has) between China, the US, Russia, UAE and the EU. Corporations will WANT to go to space to harvest raw materials. Space tourism will occur as space travel becomes safer and more commercial.

As others have said we need to get off of this rock to prevent an extinction level event from wiping out all of humanity and the more planets we colonize the lower that probability goes.

The future is people. Why do I care about Space Tourism that will cost at minum $200k for a week trick when I can't afford a house on this piece of earth? (let alone a trip to Disney-World on this earth?)

Selling me a dream that I can not cash, that most people in the United States can not cash. And the US only has 330 million people, how about the 7.3 billion other people (7.6 billion total) who also can't cash that check you are trying to "sell" with the idea of Space Tourism. What about them?

The future is people, it always has been people. The future is not more minerals, or some idea of exotic minerals. We have the tech to make our current world more sustainable yet it is not enough, why not focus on improvements of sustainable tech instead of the future which supposedly is Space Tourism.

[Fyraltari]

The future is people, it always has been people. The future is not more minerals, or some idea of exotic minerals. We have the tech to make our current world more sustainable yet it is not enough, why not focus on improvements of sustainable tech instead of the future which supposedly is Space Tourism.

We can do both. If you're looking at wated money/resources/manpower, the space program isn't it.

[Ramza00]

We can do both. If you're looking at wated money/resources/manpower, the space program isn't it.

Trying to sell me on the idea of Space Tourism is very much is the idea of wasted resources.

(As I explained before Space can be useful in dozens of ways, focus on those, stop focusing on Space Tourism.)

[Anonymouswizard]

We can do both. If you're looking at wated money/resources/manpower, the space program isn't it.

Yeah, the main problem with the space program is that it's long term investment, setting up a base on the Moon will take a decade, getting an asteroid into position for mining will take at minimum months (I suspect at least a year), and I've not no idea how long setting up a skyhook to make breaking the gravity well cheaper will take (or how much the thing will cost).

But as a long term investment that'll safeguard the future of humanity? The only thing up there with the space program is switching to renewable energy, and the space program has already seen massive returns. Maybe not enough to justify the cost of going to the Moon yet, but Helium mining could solve that.

What's at this point probably wasted manpower is attempts to get people to other planets, and convincing most people that it's worth their time to be excited about opportunities that they will never be able to afford (but if we stay on this topic we're in going to drift into not okay areas).

Maybe by the end of this century you'll be able to be one of the first residents on Venusian blimp cities, or living in a Martian dome. But nobody will have that opportunity if we don't invest in space, beer it at the end of this century or the end of this planet's life.

[Caledonian]

The problem here is that people are so excited about our ability to do things, like send humans to the Moon and establishing a hypothetical base there, that they don't actually bother with figuring out whether we should do those things.

What would we gain from setting up a base on the Moon? What benefit would we gain?

That's where thinking on the matter should begin. But space enthusiasts aren't asking those questions at all - they're starting with the conclusion they want to reach and then not even making ad-hoc justifications.

Space isn't the future. It's a dead-end.

[Anonymouswizard]

What would we gain from setting up a base on the Moon? What benefit would we gain?

Potential He-3, possibly some other resources, a place to refuel craft after they've spent lots of delta-v reaching it's orbit. Possibly access to some other rare resources, I forget because potential He-3 fusion is already a good reason to begin mining it.

[Ramza00]

Potential He-3, possibly some other resources, a place to refuel craft after they've spent lots of delta-v reaching it's orbit. Possibly access to some other rare resources, I forget because potential He-3 fusion is already a good reason to begin mining it.

With the moon being only 1.3 light seconds away do we even need human operators to mine He-3? Maybe we should be spending more money on boston dynamics, or rockets, or biodomes, etc. (The moon is so close it is an easy goal and will be much cheaper than mars, but also because it is so close what will the advantage of setting up a human base there since robots will be doing the mining anyway?)

[Anonymouswizard]

With the moon being only 1.3 light seconds away do we even need human operators to mine He-3? Maybe we should be spending more money on boston dynamics, or rockets, or biodomes, etc. (The moon is so close it is an easy goal and will be much cheaper than mars, but also because it is so close what will the advantage of setting up a human base there since robots will be doing the mining anyway?)

I think we certainly want a human or two while setting up the initial facilities, but we should definitely run the majority of it via telepresence and automated drones. Which leads to a temporary moon base until everything is up and running, followed by the occasional replacement bot and maybe very occasional human engineer to keep everything running smoothly.

Like, a permanent Moon colonisation will probably never happen, but that doesn't mean there won't be bases there for one reason or another over the coming centuries. Most space exploitation at this stage will probably be done the same way, an occasional human when you have to but mainly just robots.

[Caledonian]

There's a fusion pathway that creates He-3. Mining it probably isn't economically feasible. And using the Moon to send ships elsewhere presumes we have reason to send ships elsewhere - which we do not - and can actually send ships without, say, the crews dying due to radiation storms - which we cannot.

[Anonymouswizard]

There's a fusion pathway that creates He-3. Mining it probably isn't economically feasible. And using the Moon to send ships elsewhere presumes we have reason to send ships elsewhere - which we do not - and can actually send ships without, say, the crews dying due to radiation storms - which we cannot.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on fusion power, so the viability of 'mining' He-3 will depend on the relative energy cost as compared to fusing it. But honestly, space fans get excited about ideas that are centuries away, if it happens most space infrastructure development will be about exploit resources (and reducing environmental destruction as a nice bonus).

Staying on Earth is a dead end, it is a path certain to lead to the extinction of humanity as a species. But it's a read we can stay on for a long time, we've got about five billion years until the definite deadline for leaving this rock starts to loom, and and possibly many millennia after that until the actual deadline hits. By the time that happens we might have become Time Lords, or maybe the next superplague will have wiped us out already.

The key benefits to space development are the ecological bonuses we can get: potentially cleaner energy and stopping environmental destruction from things like strip mining. Now the first we should be working on by developing renewables on Earth, but that doesn't mean that there's no reason to develop space. Just no reason to build orbital habitats or have humans colonise other planets for billions of years.

[Rakaydos]

To return from mars, astronauts need to refuel their rocket on mars. The leading canidate for this refuing process involves using solar electricity, water ice, and atmospheric CO2, and turning it into Methane (primary component of Natural Gas) and oxygen.

If you DONT think this technoligy has applications for offsetting climate change here on earth, after they work the kinks out, I dont know what to tell you.

[Ramza00]

To return from mars, astronauts need to refuel their rocket on mars. The leading canidate for this refuing process involves using solar electricity, water ice, and atmospheric CO2, and turning it into Methane (primary component of Natural Gas) and oxygen.

If you DONT think this technoligy has applications for offsetting climate change here on earth, after they work the kinks out, I dont know what to tell you.

How would going to Mars make that tech easier to develop?

It is like throwing a person in a hole with no materials and tell them to invent a ladder. Why do you need to be in a hole to see the benefit of a ladder? How would being in a hole make this easier? Especially if there is no resources in the hole already?

Then person 2 in this metaphor will counter, there will be materials in said hole for after I throw person 1 in this hole I will also throw them materials to build a ladder. Person 1 who is now stuck then responds why did we not build the ladder before throwing me in here in the first place. Also I think my leg is broken for it hurts when I place weight on it. And since I am in a hole there is no doctor to repair it and make a brace.

[Caledonian]

Staying on Earth is a dead end, it is a path certain to lead to the extinction of humanity as a species.

ALL paths lead to the extinction of humanity as a species. ALL of them!

But it's a read we can stay on for a long time, we've got about five billion years until the definite deadline for leaving this rock starts to loom

Do you seriously imagine that humanity surviving until the sun starts to burn out is an actual possibility?

If you want to reduce environmental damage, take the money you'd spend on putting humans in space and invest it in recycling research.

[Rakaydos]

How would going to Mars make that tech easier to develop?

It is like throwing a person in a hole with no materials and tell them to invent a ladder. Why do you need to be in a hole to see the benefit of a ladder? How would being in a hole make this easier? Especially if there is no resources in the hole already?

Then person 2 in this metaphor will counter, there will be materials in said hole for after I throw person 1 in this hole I will also throw them materials to build a ladder. Person 1 who is now stuck then responds why did we not build the ladder before throwing me in here in the first place. Also I think my leg is broken for it hurts when I place weight on it. And since I am in a hole there is no doctor to repair it and make a brace.

The trick is, you tell someone that they are going in the hole -next- week, and to figure out what they need to bring with them in order to get out. Preparation is key.

The space program is a crucible. Because going beyond earth is so difficult, it is often assumed that off the self solutions will never work- either they fail because the enviroment is too hostile, or they are just "overbuilt" and weigh too much to be worth sending. Everything is a one-off custom solution that pushes the edge of standard engineering practice and beyond.

It's the "pushing past the borders of comfortable engineering" that creates new things. We have ladders, but if I can only bring a 2' long tube into the hole with me, I need to figure out how to make a fold-out ladder fit in a 2' tube.

Dont get distracted by ISRU. That's just the engineering solution of "It's harder to bring a ladder to that particular hole than it would be to just build one there." That's not a universal solution, but it will be a common one in spaceflight. But the particular ladder in question, sabatier-reaction methane production, does develop a technoligy that's been known about since the 1800s but hasnt been made into an industrial scale process, the way a company like SpaceX wants it to be.

[Ramza00]

The trick is, you tell someone that they are going in the hole -next- week, and to figure out what they need to bring with them in order to get out. Preparation is key.

The space program is a crucible. Because going beyond earth is so difficult, it is often assumed that off the self solutions will never work- either they fail because the enviroment is too hostile, or they are just "overbuilt" and weigh too much to be worth sending. Everything is a one-off custom solution that pushes the edge of standard engineering practice and beyond.

It's the "pushing past the borders of comfortable engineering" that creates new things. We have ladders, but if I can only bring a 2' long tube into the hole with me, I need to figure out how to make a fold-out ladder fit in a 2' tube.

Dont get distracted by ISRU. That's just the engineering solution of "It's harder to bring a ladder to that particular hole than it would be to just build one there." That's not a universal solution, but it will be a common one in spaceflight. But the particular ladder in question, sabatier-reaction methane production, does develop a technoligy that's been known about since the 1800s but hasnt been made into an industrial scale process, the way a company like SpaceX wants it to be.

I reject the principle of a crucible is necessary to do innovation.

It is merely industrial policy and a nation state or a way too rich billionaire deciding to do industrial policy. Then artificial crucibles can be more effective than actual crucibles, especially if space is way too hostile that you are not actually doing actual learning for it takes too long to set up even the first iteration of the experiment, especially a successful iteration of the experiment that will not kill the humans at the space station, moon base, mars base, etc.

I repeat what I said earlier. Pay people to set up "self-contained biospheres" on earth with cargo containers. Learn from those experiments, do hundreds of those experiments for a fraction of the cost than it takes to do one successful experiment in space, or on an asteroid, moon, mars, etc for there is a 100x cost due to how expensive rocket fuel is. It costs $10k per lb of stuff to put into space, and the Falcon Heavy brings it down to what? $1k per lb, other people think it is closer to $500 per lb ... I think the estimate is? (with the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 being in between the costs of those two.)

I am not against rocket technology (for rockets put cool satellites, probes, etc into space and they pay for themselves.) But lets get the biology stuff done pat prior to putting all that expensive stuff into space to support our meat sacks for I love my meat sack, I think most 7 billion people love their meat sacks, but it is so hard to use very little resources in space to keep our meat sacks in a health space, let alone other problems like keeping the atmosphere and so on the right balance to grow plants, keep our human selves, etc balanced. Biosphere 2 in the 90s was a [censored] disaster. The problem though with Biosphere 2 is we never iterated and did it on a more massive scale learning from individual successes, repeating it again and again till we figured it out.

Figure out how to do the stuff on Earth first prior to sending it into Space!