Once and for all...are humans or robots better for Mars?

On Jan 20, 4:03*am, Pat Flannery wrote:

I'm waiting for the manned flights to Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, and Neptune. ;-)

Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are right out.

A man could set foot on Mercury at night, after sunset.

A man could set foot on Pluto.

Would it be worth doing? Probably not, until space exploration had
advanced to a very great degree.

But Mars, like the Moon, is a reasonable destination for human
astronauts. Whether soon, or in the distant future, is the only real
question.

John Savard

On Jan 20, 6:11*am, Pat Flannery wrote:

You want to see further manned exploration of the Moon, or manned
flights to Mars, figure out a way for someone outside of the aerospace
companies building the spacecraft to go there to make a buck off of it.

That won't happen.

So why is a human presence on Mars worth the cost?

Even miners on the Moon, and L5 colonies building solar power
satellites, don't make much sense. Nuclear power is cheaper, and with
breeders, relatively long-term.

But the human race should not have all its eggs in one basket.

John Savard

In article , Jochem Huhmann writes:
Pat Flannery writes:
On 1/20/2011 2:58 AM, Jochem Huhmann wrote:

Or to turn that around: Look at a one-way robotic mission that gets the
same mass to Mars as a manned mission needs. Then compare which mission
can do more. You could spray hundreds or thousands of rovers over Mars
for the same mass that a small crew needs just to stumble around in the
dust near their lander for three months and then return.

And the nice thing is, you don't have to worry about getting the rovers
back either; in fact, the longer they stay, the better.

Yes, and this is one reason why robotic missions are so much more
mass-efficient: Instead of carrying lots of fuel, food etc. for the
return leg they can carry actual payload. And of course some bare human

"return leg" should really read "outbound leg, entire time there, and
return leg".

--
Michael F. Stemper
#include Standard_Disclaimer
Nostalgia just ain't what it used to be.

On 1/20/2011 5:55 AM, Jochem Huhmann wrote:
I think manned missions to Mars have a huge romantic appeal (and I'm all
for them), but if what you're really after is hard scientific data
they're rather pointless. And I also think that as long as most people
propagating manned missions secretly think of the "romantic" part and
just pretend to have "hard" arguments for manned missions nothing ever
will come out of that. Either say "I want manned missions because we CAN
go there and therefore we should" or shut up and go for rovers and
probes...

A spooky concept is that you send people there, and they find out that
there is indeed life there that can tolerate the very hostile conditions
- and it's microscopic in nature.
Would you ever dare let them return to Earth given the small but real
threat of letting something along the lines of the Andromeda Strain
loose on earth?


I always thought we should have built more MER's, considering how well
Spirit and Opportunity did and the low cost of the whole program.

I think one problem is that the landing methods of these things are only
good for a very small part of Mars. You need low elevations with
(somewhat) thicker atmosphere to get them down with parachutes only. And
of course you need enough sun, so that a landing in Valles Marineris
(which would make an interesting target) is probably a bad idea. You
surely get a denser atmosphere in a canyon 7 km deep, but you'll also
get deep shadows all over.


Given how wide it is (600 km at some points)it should still have a lot
of sections where that is doable, as its max depth is only 8 km.
The curvature of Mars per km. is a lot higher than Earth, so in a lot of
places you would be at the center of the bottom of the canyon and the
walls of it would be invisible over the horizon to either side.


And if you have to redesign the landers and rovers anyway, you can also
go all the way and fix some shortcomings, like the small size and
somewhat tight equipment.


One thing you could do if you were going to land a lot of them is
optimize them into several types to perform specific exploratory
functions, all using the same chassis design and power supply systems.
A group of them could then be landed at the same area of interest and
give it a really thorough going over.
One thing I do want to see landed there is a really high-powered optical
microscope in the 500-1,000x magnification range.
Life on Earth leaves microscope remains that can be found in even the
most desolate areas, and if there was or is presently life of some sort
on Mars, you should be able to find either its remains or microfossils
if it in the soil and rocks.

Pat

On Jan 20, 10:38*am, wrote:
In alt.philosophy ZX wrote:
...

The fact this question is comparing robots to humans pretty much sums it
all up.

The accountants say we can't afford a 2nd basket so that's that.

I am not an accountant, but they are right. We can't.

Anyone who says "we need space development in order to create backup
storage for human race" is asking, whether they realize it or not, for
nothing less than duplication of our entire civilization[1] WITH NO
IDENTIFIABLE INTERMEDIATE GOALS.

For the foreseeable future there is no way to make manned presence in
space be anything by enormous resource sink. Some people talk about
"space resources", but a) I am yet to see any space resource which
could not be, with some ingenuity, replicated on Earth at the fraction
of the cost, and b) even if a resource is found which, with some
gigantic initial investment, eventually starts paying for itself
(energy is one most likely), the fewer live humans are involved in
harvesting such resource the more likely it is to pay for itself --
given all the difficulties involved in keeping mammals alive in space.

Every colonization process on Earth happened in incremental steps.
People would settle some place because there was a short-term economic
benefit to it. Then they would build up the place, adding to its
economic value and making it more attractive to later immigrants. But
in space, without some game-changing technology (AI, mind uploading,
radical genetic engineering, radical cyborgization), there is simply
no "from here to there" path of incrementally increasing benefits --
because to put it bluntly, there are NO economic benefits to having
humans in space.

If you CAN identify some intermediate goals which would bring tangible
benefit and bootstrap further road toward "second basket", then THEY
should be your reason for manned spaceflight. "Second basket" argument
won't cut it with anyone who is not already a fanatic.

If you personally want to make "second basket" a reality in some
distant future, my suggestion is go into genetics and/or medical
technology field, and start working on ways for humans to live on much
simpler and more failure-tolerant life-support system. Stomach which
digests anything a goat and a hyena can digest would be a huge boon to
space colonization at some point. AND it has immediate applications on
Earth.

[1] Actually they are asking for more than that. They want to
duplicate our entire civilization AND the ecosystem which supports it.
On Earth ecosystem is sort of free.

In article , Jeff Findley writes:
In article , says...

ISTR, about a year into their mission(s), Steven Squires (head honcho
of the rover program) being quoted as saying that a human geologist
could do what either rover had done in a year - in thirty days.

True, but it gets better than that. A human in a suit has a better
reach (longer arms) and more power than the tiny little robotic arm and
grinder on the rovers. A human in a suit with the appropriate hand
tools could gather samples that the rovers couldn't possibly gather.

Are you sure that Squires wasn't taking those into account?

--
Michael F. Stemper
#include Standard_Disclaimer
A preposition is something that you should never end a sentence with.

On Jan 20, 1:54*pm, Fred J. McCall wrote:
" wrote:
better to do something affordable that explores, might have some
scientific payoff, doesnt risk human life, remember the chilling after
effects of apollo 13?

If people aren't going, what's to explore? And no, I DON'T remember
said "chilling".

the near disaster of a dead crew, is the root cause of the cancelation
of the final lanings.

What utter hogwash! *Explain, then, why there were another five
flights over the next two and a half years?

Yes, it is "hogwash" in the sense that Apollo 13 did not stop the
program or even came close to stopping it, but the answer to your
question -- because it was Cold War. Demonstrating US technological
superiority over USSR was a specific, identifiable goal. No such goal
exists today.

Jochem Huhmann wrote:

"Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" writes:

A small crew is so vastly superior to the rovers that it's not even
funny. Just as one example, if the rover spots something interesting
with its cameras X distance away, mission control has to hold a
significant debate about sending the rover there, and if it diverts the
rover any significant distance, you're going to wait a LONG time for it
to get there. A human will spot the same thing, jog over, and take a
look and decide if it was worth it in an afternoon.

Except that they wouldn't. Jog over, I mean. The crew would be used as a
kind of very fragile, very precious and extremely hard to maintain human
robot.

Except - reality proves you false. During the lunar missions crews
repeatedly 'jogged over' to investigate potentially interesting
geology.

OK, you *could* do different things and you could do some things you
can't do with robots, but if you look at the bottom line it's just not
worth it.

That's an opinion (and one that is shaped by bias and remarkably free
of influence by facts), not a fact. There is a difference.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

Pat Flannery wrote:
One thing you could do if you were going to land a lot of them is
optimize them into several types to perform specific exploratory
functions, all using the same chassis design and power supply systems.

And when you have a half dozen different rover designs, the theorized
cost savings of sending a bunch of MER rovers evaporate - because
you're no longer sending a bunch of MER rovers.

A group of them could then be landed at the same area of interest and
give it a really thorough going over.

So long as the 'area of interest' is a fairly flat low lying area
relatively near the equator. Otherwise, you're back to more expensive
and complex landing systems and once again the theorized cost savings
evaporate.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

On Jan 20, 2:26*pm, Fred J. McCall wrote:
Ilya2 wrote:
On Jan 20, 1:54 pm, Fred J. McCall wrote:
" wrote:
better to do something affordable that explores, might have some
scientific payoff, doesnt risk human life, remember the chilling after
effects of apollo 13?

If people aren't going, what's to explore? And no, I DON'T remember
said "chilling".

the near disaster of a dead crew, is the root cause of the cancelation
of the final lanings.

What utter hogwash! Explain, then, why there were another five
flights over the next two and a half years?

Yes, it is "hogwash" in the sense that Apollo 13 did not stop the
program or even came close to stopping it, but the answer to your
question -- because it was Cold War. Demonstrating US technological
superiority over USSR was a specific, identifiable goal. No such goal
exists today.

We'd already done that as of Apollo 11. *No flights after that were
necessary to "demonstrate US technological superiority over USSR".

Doing it only once would have looked like a stunt or a fluke. Doing it
six or seven times removed all doubt.

Apollo was never about science. It was about Cold War. There is a
reason of 12 men who walked on the Moon only one was a professional
scientist, and the rest muilitary pilots.