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The Urge to Explore



 
 
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  #21  
Old June 9th 05, 11:05 PM
lclough
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David Johnston wrote:
On 8 Jun 2005 19:57:43 -0700, "L. Merk" wrote:


Paul Dietz, John Ordover, Brenda Clough and other Exploration Deniers
claim that humanity has no urge to explore. However, they are insular
nobodies attempting to project their own inner death upon humankind.
Psychologists agree that the drive to explore is a quintessential human
need.



How much exploration did you do last month?



He's obviously dived up his ass some.

Brenda


--
---------
Brenda W. Clough
http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/

Recent short fiction: PARADOX, Autumn 2003
http://home.nyc.rr.com/paradoxmag//index.html

Upcoming short fiction in FIRST HEROES (TOR, May '04)
http://members.aol.com/wenamun/firstheroes.html

  #22  
Old June 9th 05, 11:06 PM
David Johnston
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On Thu, 9 Jun 2005 14:53:44 -0400, "Jeff Findley"
wrote:

At our current level of technology, any conceivable effort
expended in human-presence space exploration simply won't return
more than the investment because humans have to carry along with
them bulky, complex, _expensive_ life-support hardware. Meanwhile,
we look through bigger and better telescopes, send robotic avatars,
etc. _because they don't need life-support hardware_.


This is wrong. What's holding us back isn't the "mass of the life support
hardware", but the high cost of launching *anything* into space. When costs
are in the $10,000 per lb to LEO range, *everything* you launch costs a lot
of money.


So...how is it wrong?
  #23  
Old June 10th 05, 12:22 AM
Sydney Webb
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lclough wrote:

snip

He's obviously dived up his ass some.


Hi Brenda. Love your work.

It may have escaped the attention of you and other posters that this
thread has been cross-posted to four newsgroups:

rec.arts.sf.science
rec.arts.sf.written
soc.history.what-if
sci.space.policy

Recent posts, your included, have no relevance to soc.history.what-if -
a newsgroup devoted to the discussion of historical counter-factuals.
Could you, and other contributors to this thread kindly remove
soc.history.what-if from the groups to which you post this thread.

[Headers trimmed]

- Syd
  #24  
Old June 10th 05, 01:12 AM
Jeff Findley
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wrote in message
oups.com...
True, but it will -always- be more expensive to keep humans alive in
space than to send robots - drop the price to orbit, you make robots
cheaper to send too. There would have to be a profitable reason that
humans -have- to be there to make it worth sending humans up. Can't
think off hand of anything humans can do in space that a probe can't do
better, and at -zero- risk to human life.


While this is true, the benefits of sending humans are far greater than
sending "robots". Look at the lunar missions to date. We got back more and
better scientific samples from the manned missions than all of the unmanned
missions combined. When doing things like geology, a person can evaluate a
site faster than a robot because they are there. The Mars rovers, by
comparison, move at a snails pace when finding interesting samples and they
can't bring any samples back to Earth for analysis.

For example, think of how many times more expensive it would have been
to send a manned probe to Titan as opposed to what we did do, send an
unmanned probe. That multiplier effect is going to stay in place no
matter how low you get the price-to-space.


This is also true, but again, the returns are still lower than if it were a
manned mission. The debate then shifts to the cost/benefit ratio of manned
versus unmanned. Manned missions are typically more expensive, but their
benefits can are also be far greater.

Also, if you reduce launch costs by two or more orders of magnitude, which
is what some people hope can be done with properly designed reusable launch
vehicles, the difference in cost between manned and unmanned missions start
to drop as well. This can make manned missions start to look better since
the unmanned exploration technology we have today (e.g. Mars rovers) is
still very slow and cumbersome compared to having an astronaut in its place.

Jeff
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Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.


  #25  
Old June 10th 05, 01:34 AM
Jeff Findley
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"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:xg1qe.5643$6s.3196@fed1read02...
Jeff Findley wrote:
"Mark Fergerson" wrote in message
news:hyXpe.5626$6s.252@fed1read02...

At our current level of technology, any conceivable effort
expended in human-presence space exploration simply won't return
more than the investment because humans have to carry along with
them bulky, complex, _expensive_ life-support hardware. Meanwhile,
we look through bigger and better telescopes, send robotic avatars,
etc. _because they don't need life-support hardware_.


This is wrong. What's holding us back isn't the "mass of the life

support
hardware", but the high cost of launching *anything* into space. When

costs
are in the $10,000 per lb to LEO range, *everything* you launch costs a

lot
of money.


I just love it when critics contradict themselves:


The fact is that on exploration missions like Apollo, people did far more
exploration and sample return than all of the unmanned missions combined.
Even today's Mars rovers move at a snail's pace on Mars, far slower than a
man in a pressure suit could move. The cost to benefit ratio is debatable,
because the "benefit" is currently something that can't be easily expressed
in terms of dollars. One can easily pick a definition of "benefit" that
makes either a manned mission or an unmanned mission look better.

Only when the benefit can be expressed in dollars will we be able to
determine whether man or machine is the better tool in outer space
exploration.

What's needed are new vehicles...


Did you not read what I wrote? Did you miss the part about "our
current level of technology"?


New technology is not necessary. It looks like Space-X is going to be
producing cheaper launch vehicles than the usual suspects with little in the
way of new technology. It's the design philosophy of luanch vehicles that
needs to change, not the technology.

There's an old SF short story along these lines; _The Cold
Equations_. Read it.


You're not doing much better than the original poster. Old sci-fi isn't
usually the best place to look for an explanation of why spaceflight is

so
expensive.


Ever actually read _The Cold Equations_?


Not yet, but I am familiar with the book. There are a few good web sites
that talk about the book. For example:
http://home.tiac.net/~cri/1999/coldeq.html

If you take DC-X as an example, the cost estimation equations NASA uses to
estimate program costs predicted a far higher cost than the actual program
cost. Note that there was little in the way of new technology in DC-X.
Most of the components were either "off the shelf" or were straight forward
(new) designs using existing technology. Those equations contain many bad
assumptions and are not bound by physics so much as institutional inertia.

Jeff
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Remove icky phrase from email address to get a valid address.


  #26  
Old June 10th 05, 01:41 AM
Paul F. Dietz
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Mark Fergerson wrote:

What you absolutely refuse to accept is that for the exploring
organism to continue to survive, there must be a return on the effort
invested in the exploration _greater than the investment_. Exploration
occurs to acquire resources. If an organism expends more resources than
it gets back in any situation including exploration, the organism dies.

At our current level of technology, any conceivable effort expended in
human-presence space exploration simply won't return more than the
investment [...]


Also, it's not at all clear why something that's important for
unintelligent organisms is also something that should drive government
or other societal goals. It's a mixing of unrelated categories.
And as I've pointed out before, just because there's an instinct or
drive for something, that doesn't mean government should promote
it.

Should government actively promote sex, for example, in all its
various unusual permutations? People certainly have a strong
sex drive, stronger than a putative exploration drive. Wouldn't
that mean the budget for the National Sex Administration should be
correspondingly larger than that of NASA?

Paul
  #27  
Old June 10th 05, 01:43 AM
Derek Lyons
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"Jeff Findley" wrote:

The fact is that on exploration missions like Apollo, people did far more
exploration and sample return than all of the unmanned missions combined.


Which handwaves away the inconvenient fact that there isn't a real,
organized, focused unmanned program to actually honestly compare
Apollo to. At least on the American side of the house, the unmanned
side existed almost solely as a support function of the manned
program, any science produced was incidental and distinctly secondary.

D.
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-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL
  #28  
Old June 10th 05, 01:44 AM
Paul F. Dietz
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Jeff Findley wrote:

While this is true, the benefits of sending humans are far greater than
sending "robots". Look at the lunar missions to date. We got back more and
better scientific samples from the manned missions than all of the unmanned
missions combined.


However, the most important scientific data from the moon were
isotope results, and that could have been obtained with sample
return. Indeed, it could have been obtained with that samples
that *were* returned by the Soviets.

Paul
  #30  
Old June 10th 05, 05:20 PM
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Paul F. Dietz wrote:
Mark Fergerson wrote:

What you absolutely refuse to accept is that for the exploring
organism to continue to survive, there must be a return on the effort
invested in the exploration _greater than the investment_. Exploration
occurs to acquire resources. If an organism expends more resources than
it gets back in any situation including exploration, the organism dies.

At our current level of technology, any conceivable effort expended in
human-presence space exploration simply won't return more than the
investment [...]


Also, it's not at all clear why something that's important for
unintelligent organisms is also something that should drive government
or other societal goals. It's a mixing of unrelated categories.
And as I've pointed out before, just because there's an instinct or
drive for something, that doesn't mean government should promote
it.

Should government actively promote sex, for example, in all its
various unusual permutations? People certainly have a strong
sex drive, stronger than a putative exploration drive. Wouldn't
that mean the budget for the National Sex Administration should be
correspondingly larger than that of NASA?


Well, the national average expenditure per capita probably is. The
difference being, the government doesn't have to take money from
citizens to invest in sex. We do that without regulation. National
health provision... opinions vary. Outer space? Most of Joe Public
would rather put the money towards a burger. But sex - ah, now you're
talking.

(I am, of course, including spinoff industries such as fine
restaurants, motels, chocolate...)

 




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