Good news for space policy

Greg Kuperberg wrote:

In article ,
Christopher M. Jones wrote:
See, that's where you're wrong. In principle and under the right
circumstances manned and unmanned spaceflight would be completely
different. But as practiced now, especially by NASA, they are not all
that terribly different, except perhaps in cost.

No they are completely different, and not only in cost. Manned
spaceflight is much more expensive and unmanned spaceflight is much
more useful. And that's what the public doesn't realize. Most people
think that they are about equivalent.

Define 'useful.' Sadly, not a lot of people are that excited about
the data from unmanned probes (unless perhaps they involve cool
pictures) either.

If you mean things like satcoms, those are basically as invisible
(when was the last time you saw the caption 'via satellite' on
television?) to the public as a microwave relay tower. And in a way,
they *should* be invisible parts of the infrastructure.

Many don't even consciously think of the space-based aspect of
weather images anymore.

In article ,
(Greg Kuperberg) wrote:

No they are completely different, and not only in cost. Manned
spaceflight is much more expensive and unmanned spaceflight is much
more useful.

I can't agree with that second statement. Of course this would be
because we have different definitions of "useful." My definition is:
"helps develop technologies and experience which will enable off-world
colonization." By this definition, space science isn't generally useful
(except for experiments we haven't been doing as we should, such as
variable-G biology), but anything that gets people living and working in
space IS useful.

They could be assembling cars out of Legos for all I car -- as long as
they're doing it in space, there's utility in it. (Of course it would
be a lot MORE useful if these Lego cars were built by tourists or
private assembly-line workers rather than by elite government employees,
but even the latter is better than having nobody in space at all.)

- Joe

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| Joseph J. Strout Check out the Mac Web Directory: |
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In article ,
(Greg Kuperberg) wrote:

In article ,
Christopher M. Jones wrote:
See, that's where you're wrong. In principle and under the right
circumstances manned and unmanned spaceflight would be completely
different. But as practiced now, especially by NASA, they are not all
that terribly different, except perhaps in cost.

No they are completely different, and not only in cost. Manned
spaceflight is much more expensive and unmanned spaceflight is much
more useful. And that's what the public doesn't realize. Most people
think that they are about equivalent.

Sending people out to do things is undoubtedly more expensive, but to
claim that unmanned spaceflight is "much more useful" is just plain flawed
reasoning.

For a start, by that same strain of logic you could argue that geologists
should not go on field trips here in Earth. Instead they should stay in
their offices and send little robots out instead--on the ground what those
little robots could do more useful things than a human geologist sent out
in person to the same site.

The fact that by and large they don't says it all.

Consider Harrison Schmitt. Scientists pressed NASA hard to put him on one
of the Apollo lunar missions. They did so because they realised having a
trained geologist on the Moon was a lot more useful than having him sit in
some backroom watching somebody else do it on a TV screen, whether that
"somebody else" was military pilot with limited geological training or a
little robot with no training at all. Just a TV camera and a handful of
other sensors.

Remember, no matter how useful an unmanned space probe may be, somewhere
behind every one of those probes there sits a human being. Usually a whole
flock of humans, in fact. Not only the engineers who "drive" the thing,
but also those whose job it is to get that probe to do something useful:
ie the mission's scientists.

Space probes do not do useful things all by themselves. They only do what
some human commands them to do. That means that at some point some human
has to decide what would be a useful thing for it to do--and what would
not. Or at least be less useful.

The Sojourner rover, for example, did not choose for itself which rocks to
sample with its alpha-proton gear or which route to take to get there. By
and large a human made those decisions. Even then it could sample, at
most, one rock a day. If it made a blunder (as happened at least once, at
Yogi IIRC) the humans lost an entire day.

Sojourner, in effect, was a robot geology tool which the human geologists
back on Earth were obliged to manipulate from a distance of millions of
miles. That in turn made them dependent on what that tool could do, how
fast it could do its job, and how quickly the information could be
returned to Earth so that further decisions could be made as to what to do
next.

Sojourner certainly produced useful information. Yet would you argue that
doing it that way generated more useful information than having a human
geologist on Mars with the same instruments and a geology hammer?

--
Stephen Souter

http://www.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/

(Stephen Souter) wrote in
:

In article ,
(Greg Kuperberg) wrote:

In article ,
Christopher M. Jones wrote:
See, that's where you're wrong. In principle and under the right
circumstances manned and unmanned spaceflight would be completely
different. But as practiced now, especially by NASA, they are not
all that terribly different, except perhaps in cost.

No they are completely different, and not only in cost. Manned
spaceflight is much more expensive and unmanned spaceflight is much
more useful. And that's what the public doesn't realize. Most
people think that they are about equivalent.

Sending people out to do things is undoubtedly more expensive, but to
claim that unmanned spaceflight is "much more useful" is just plain
flawed reasoning.

For a start, by that same strain of logic you could argue that
geologists should not go on field trips here in Earth. Instead they
should stay in their offices and send little robots out instead--on
the ground what those little robots could do more useful things than a
human geologist sent out in person to the same site.

Good point, and I see that Greg is still ignoring Henry Spencer's post on
the same subject. To paraphrase: The one data point we do have for
comparing manned and unmanned science return is the lunar program of the
1960s. The unmanned spacecraft (Ranger, Surveyor, Lunar Orbiter) cost about
10% of the manned spacecraft (Apollo), but accounted for far less than 10%
of the results.

Indeed, one scientist stated something like (please help with the
attribution, Henry), "The geology of the moon *is* the geology of Apollo -
all else combined is a mere footnote."

I have little doubt the same will hold true for Mars - launch windows alone
dictate that the first landing will probably stay on Mars over a year.
Though the unmanned spacecraft have taught us much, the return from the
first manned landing will overwhelm them.

Manned missions do have a certain minimum "cost of entry", and below that
threshold, unmanned missions are the only option. That cost of entry also
makes small manned missions less cost-effective than large ones. So perhaps
the real problem with our manned space program is that we don't think big
enough. Von Braun's original Mars expedition had a crew of 70, after all.

--
JRF

Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

Jorge R. Frank wrote:

The unmanned spacecraft (Ranger, Surveyor, Lunar Orbiter) cost about
10% of the manned spacecraft (Apollo), but accounted for far less than 10%
of the results.

It's not clear to me how you measure 'results'. Also, if unmanned
sample return had been all we had there would have been many papers
on those samples instead of on the Apollo samples. Apollo certainly
returned more mass than the unmanned sample return would, but it's not
at all clear this translates into proportionally more science. After
all, most of the lunar material returned has not been intensively
examined.

The unmanned non-sample spacecraft did solve some of the big problems
before man ever reached the moon (for example, determining that the moon
is evolved, not primitive, that the maria are covered with basalt, and
that the highlands are anorthositic). Unmanned sample return would have
provided the evidence necessary to reach the giant impact theory (oxygen
isotopes, depletion of volatiles).

Paul

On 27 Jul 2003 16:35:20 GMT, in a place far, far away, "Jorge R.
Frank" made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

Manned missions do have a certain minimum "cost of entry", and below that
threshold, unmanned missions are the only option. That cost of entry also
makes small manned missions less cost-effective than large ones. So perhaps
the real problem with our manned space program is that we don't think big
enough.

That is indeed the fundamental problem. What people don't understand
is that big wouldn't cost that much more than small, and the unit cost
would be vastly less.

--
simberg.interglobal.org * 310 372-7963 (CA) 307 739-1296 (Jackson Hole)
interglobal space lines * 307 733-1715 (Fax) http://www.interglobal.org

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