I very much like Scott Manley’s videos: technical, detailed, interesting analyses of space flights, delivered with a pretty accent. He applied his critical eye to the recent SpaceX kaboom, and it was informative. He explains how it improves on the last disaster, which is valid — this time, it didn’t demolish the launch platform, and all the first stage engines fired up this time. Progress!
Except then, he goes on to insist this was a success.
That’s the most generous definition of “success” ever. All the engines fired on the first stage, and it successfully uncoupled from the second stage…then it exploded spectacularly. The second stage went on to also explode. Victory! This is not to say that they didn’t learn things from the failed mission, but it’s still a dramatic failure. Unless the intent was to loft the most expensive firework ever, it’s still not a success.
This time, a higher percentage of the debris field was in the ocean.
Progress. /s
Yes, the launch was an improvement over the first one, but what was the goal of the launch after separation. I don’t believe the goal was for both stages to explode after separation.
Totally more efficient than NASA! Why, within the same time frame of development, NASA only had one early Apollo flight explode – their 12th test flight, AS-203.
And oddly, NASA didn’t destroy their launch pad for any of the Apollo flights.
Although, they did have an Antares blow up Wallops Island in 2014…
I dunno, I rather prefer NASA’s successes to SpaceX’s Trumpian successes. That whole raining burning rocket components thing largely being considered a bad thing. SpaceX instead is emulating the Army and Air Force, complete with rockets with a reverse gear at times.
Or the Jupiter (and one SpaceX) rocket that had a cryo gas leak, depressurizing the tank, causing the rocket stack to collapse. Although, the funny prize remains a Redstone rocket, engines fire, lifts off six inches, engines go out, stack slams down intact, then the parachutes on the capsule deploy (too short a cable on the Redstone, unplugged and killed the engines and rather than verify altitude, a simple timer was used for the parachutes, nearly allowing the entire stack to get blown over).
Or the Pershing missile, which heeled over and still under first stage thrust, was speeding directly toward the launch and observation bunker. Heard in the audio, someone screaming to the RSO to destruct the missile, then giving a “good job!”, to which the RSO stated, “I didn’t destruct it, it did it itself”.
It’s incremental progress toward a very lofty goal.
Remember, Mars is the eventual target. And I feel sure in predicting, possibly within the next decade or so, these rockets will be blowing up there instead of here.
It’s a success because nobody was on it.
It’s a failure because Elon wasn’t.
Well, given that it didn’t have a payload on it (not even a mass simulator)… yes, it seems like that was the intent?
Rockets that are expected to not explode have payloads. Otherwise, you really are just burning money for no purpose, so why launch at all?
PZ, as much as you (warrantedly) hate Musk, this is a (partial) success. Don’t let the contempt for the man blind you. I’m sure they wanted it to NOT explode, but it did accomplish more than the last one.
Is it an extremely negligent and wasteful testing program which exists primarily to feed the ego of a meglomanical, cartoonishly immature idiot, instead of advancing science?
Yes.
Is it rapidly advancing the rocketry ability of humanity?
Also yes.
Both of these things can be true simultaneously. A self-confessed “space nerd” like Manley focusing on the successful portion (IDK, 30% successful , 70% failure?) rather than the failed portion is perfectly expected. Getting excited about seeing the rapid pace of the thing you geek out about is what geeks do. If a spider experiment completely blew up in your face, and you failed to achieve most of your goals, but you learned a couple key lessons along the way, and you celebrated those lessons, we would applaud you, and deservedly so.
Now… you aren’t burning billions of dollars just to feed your ego while endangering others in the process, so the situations aren’t exactly comparable. Being the moderate holding a nuanced view (Musk is a fucking ego driven asshole who humanity would be better off without, but SpaceX is also advancing rocketry, mostly in spite of him rather than because of him) will probably get me shouted down here, but stop being so fucking dichotomous about this.
Muskmelon, millions expended and massive explosions If this is a success then the slaughter of thousands of innocent Israelis and Palestinians by Netanyahoo is too!
Try imagining SpaceX without Musk at the helm. I think it would be accomplishing more successes than it is now, and I’d happily support a Muskless SpaceX.
Wasn’t it Bob Dylan who sang, ‘there’s no success like failure, and that failure’s no success at all’
Yes, we should learn from our failures. And, yes, there are many competent engineers working on the projects he has bought. But, it is arrogant and deceitful to all these disasters successes. But, of course, I’d expect that from the ‘rancid muskmelon’ and his cheerleaders.
sorry, meant to write ‘to call all these disasters’ (blasted arthritic hands)
Is it rapidly advancing the rocketry ability of humanity? Also yes.
Is it really? NASA already went through their phase of exploding rockets, then they got to a phase of rockets routinely NOT exploding, then non-exploding rockets became so commonplace that the few times one of their rockets did explode (Apollo 1, Challenger) were horrible traumatizing scandals, not “but we’re making progress!” moments. Now it just looks like SpaceX, in typical “screw you, we do everything better” libertarian fashion, are doing what’s already been done their own way, and pretending they’re the bold brave innovators while failing at things that others have been doing successfully for years.
I’m all in favor of space exploration, but I’m getting damn tired of all this old-school gee-whiz technophilic hype from a company that’s trying to accomplish…what exactly? Are any of SpaceX’s real value-added accomplishments dependent on these (misnamed) “starships” they’re blowing up and calling “successful?” Is there any good reason to keep on working on that crap instead of, say, improving Starlink to better help the Ukrainians to drive out Russian invaders?
Given the safety culture at SpaceX, I expect that the next time they’ll send several engineers along on the launch to closely monitor all launch parameters without any transmission delay so they can find out the REAL reason it blows up. The incentive will be to have their names inscribed alongside Mu5k’s in the future annals of aerospace achievements.
The foregoing may sound tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also not very far from the attitudes either apparent from various labor complaints about SpaceX or endemic to “vehicle development efforts.”
It is some hype, but the first few launches of anything are hard.
NASA usually get it right by a massive, very expensive process of checks, large-scale tests and simulations before launch.
Maybe it is more cost-efficient to build more prototypes and accept more of them are lost, but I do not have detailed knowledge of the development.
The problem with space flight is the necessity of low weight rules out wide safety margins.
@9 PZ Myers – That SpaceX has gotten off the ground at all despite Musk is already a great achievement.
@12 Raging Bee – Exactly right. All this gee-whiz stuff makes me so feel old — we’ve done all this shit already. For godsakes, muskovites, we even managed to deliver a few meatbags to the moon and back in one piece. Imagine that!
Raging Bee @12:
Well, apart from the whole “fully reusable” thing, which I gather is actually a pretty big deal.
Is it really?
Unequivocally yes.
Humanity hasn’t had a comparable super-heavy lift capacity since the Saturn V or the Soviet Engeria. Regaining that capacity (supposedly increasing it fact), and doing so with a completely reusable platform would be an advancement, without question.
Is having that super-heavy capacity the best / most efficient way to advance spaceflight? That is a separate debate, one with it’s own shades of grey. Would that same money be better spent on more smaller launches? Arguably. But some proposed science missions require a massive single payload to orbit, or on-orbit refueling and assembly, which have not been used until now. Also, other super-heavy life platforms like SLS are even more expensive, and exist mostly as pork barrel spending by the US government. At something like $5 billion for Starship vs. $23 billion for SLS development…
I should have said “not been used yet” instead of “not been used until now”. Sorry if that was unclear.
Jaws @ 13, I think you had too many “n”‘s in that space achievement record, at least where SpaceX is concerned. NASA managed to launch, without explosions, a dozen Saturn rockets before one blew up and that was in the early 1960’s. Maybe one of Musk’s businesses will at least reach 1990’s levels of proficiency in a few more decades and trillions of dollars.
Sadly, it’s likely he’ll demand engineers go up in one of those roman candles and label their deaths a heroic success.
Dennis K @ 15, could you picture a SpaceX version of Apollo 13? With their unsafety culture, we’d either have crispy astronauts splattered on the moon or burned up in our atmosphere, which the company would label a successful cremation.
@16 Rob Grigjanis – Kinda like NASA’s space shuttle we ran from when people got killed. Not sure how “fully” reusable it was but not cost-effective anyway given the venerable (non-reusable) Soyuz rockets.
Raging Bee@12: Is it really? NASA already went through their phase of exploding rockets, then they got to a phase of rockets routinely NOT exploding,
AFAICT, this is pretty much exactly how you can tell whether someone is making advances in the field of rocketry.
Not all of the explosions are live-streamed like SpaceX’s, maybe they’re hidden away on a NASA test stand in a swamp somewhere. But things burning themselves up in spectacular ways is pretty fundamental to the process of pushing things to new limits when you’re working with machines whose purpose is to constructively channel tons of 6000 degree, 3500 psi gases per second into an energy output that can be measured in units of “simultaneous Hoover Dams”. Not everything can be simulated, and whether or not its done in sight of the public, destructive iteration is absolutely a part of the process.
If NASA, ESA, etc. blow up fewer rockets (and by extension, Boeing, Arianespace, etc.) these days, it really is largely because they’re just not innovating that much. For example, the “new” SLS platform still uses RS-25 engines. The same basic design first flown in 1981. They’re not even new production (that might not even be possible, and would certainly be even more expensive), just surplus stock originally made for the Shuttle. Even so, it took more than 11 years and $27 billion to launch one rocket, with no potential for re-use, and at an expected payload launch cost on the order of $15,000/kg (to LEO).
Meanwhile, starting in 2005, SpaceX developed an entirely new engine and platform, capable of re-using first stages in an entirely new way. It was launching within 5 years, and (successfully) landing in another 4. At a total R&D budget that was a fraction of SLS. Falcon rockets are a mainstay of the industry now, bringing launch costs down to under $1500/KG (which has been quietly revolutionizing access to space — for better or worse, depending on how you feel about an unobstructed night sky).
Starship goals are a leap beyond even that. It’s got the first flying full-flow staged combustion engine in history (which is a big deal as far as rocket science goes). And also one of the first methalox engines (also a big deal: for a variety of reasons, methane is believed to be a much more practical fuel for deep space exploration than the RS-25’s cryogenic hydrogen). And they’re doing it on an assembly line, with new revisions of rockets and flight hardware coming out practically every week. The aim is to be bring launch costs down by another order of magnitude. If that succeeds, it would revolutionize space access a bit less quietly, in ways I don’t think anyone even knows how to anticipate.
Obviously it’s difficult to say exactly how much Obergruppenführer Musk deserves credit for any of that. It’d be nice if the answer was “not much”, and even nicer to disentangle him entirely from the whole thing, and bring these advances back into the democratic sphere again.
It’s incontrovertible that they are advances though. Big ones.
@stuffin #2:
Bombing Hawaiian waters.
Below is an op-ed from a physicist environmental activist after the first Starship launch this spring. A newspaper revised and paywalled it at the time (photo of the page). She finally published the less-polished original submission on her blog a couple months ago, with maps the newspaper omitted.
wzrd1: that “unsafety culture” is the major fly in the ointment here. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a connection between disregard for employee and public safety, and rockets that keep on blowing up. Maybe if their top brass cared more about safety, they’d start with more realistic expectations, design things more carefully, and not rush launches just to show “progress.” That wouldn’t guarantee zero mishaps, of course, but it could at least mean fewer and/or less catastrophic mishaps; and maybe a more mature public response to mishaps.
Eh, Scott’s a good egg. Gamed with him as a loose acquaintance for years, and he generallt tends to be a glass-half-full guy. He’s looking at it in terms of improved performance, learning new potential pitfalls, and hey: the damned thing DID make it to space this time!
jack lecou@21:
Arguably, this thread is clear demonstration of one of the main reasons why such “hardware-rich” development is relatively rare: people find it hard to see something which did not 100% succeed as a success. Whether those people be the public, government, higher-ups in a company, etc., it is a hard sell for engineers to come forward and say “can we break 20 prototypes in new and inventive ways just to see what happens”?
The fact that a giggling man-child who likes to troll people is the reason SpaceX is getting to do it and getting away with far too much dangerous shit in the process, environmentally and human-wise, is not an indictment of hardware-rich development in general. The reason why NASA developed so much, so fast, in the 50s and 60s was because they could get away with hardware-rich development given the direct military applications. As soon as the direct military and political applications dried up, i.e. they had good ICBMs and had dickwaved at the Soviets enough to satisfy the needs of jingoistic nationalism, NASA couldn’t sell hardware-rich development anymore, and the pace of development slowed to a crawl.
Not all of the explosions are live-streamed like SpaceX’s, maybe they’re hidden away on a NASA test stand in a swamp somewhere.
Sounds like a safer, more sensible, and possibly cheaper way to test new rocket designs before a big public launch.
I’m not able to cheer for any success by SpaceX or for the cleverness of his engineers and technicians, because as far as I’m concerned anyone who works for him and helps to enrich him is morally bankrupt. They are as culpable as he is.
I do not give two fucks how cool you think rockets or spaceflight are. Or if you’re delusional enough to believe we can colonize anyplace other than Earth in any of our lifetimes. All scientific endeavors scheduled to fly on SpaceX rockets can wait until he’s been defeated or taken out of any kind of power. The stars will always be there. He must be stopped. Now.
The spaceflight and astronomy community is filled with indifference and cowardice with regard to the activities of SpaceX. Few within it will acknowledge that stopping creeping fascism is more important than the success of his rocket flights, which enable his continued chaos. Yes, I’m going to rain on all your parades by pointing out that whatever good you think comes from the hard work of SpaceX engineers and technicians, the fact is that their participation in his enrichment is enabling harm. Enormous harm. To our citizens and others on Earth.
Hatred is being deliberately sown on his platform, through his own well-documented demands and desires. Hatred and threats to women, to trans people, to Jews, to nonwhites. He pushes anti-vax propaganda, which carries a massive death toll.
I shouldn’t have to point out that juvenile rationalizations such as “space and spaceflight are so cool!” are just indicators that you find your own entertainment more important than the lives of your fellow citizens, especially those who are marginalized.
“But we can walk and chew gum” you retort. “We can celebrate and encourage the marvel of exploration while also condemning bigotry!” you say.
No. Not in this particular case, you can’t. Because the perpetrator of both of those things is the same person.
Which means that to stop the source and continued energy of the hatred means he must be stopped. His source of financial energy must be stopped. You cannot have it both ways. You have to pick a side, whether you’re a SpaceX astronaut, engineer, or cafeteria worker.
Believe me, I get the marvel. I’ve been a close follower and enthusiast of the American space program my entire life. I went to the cape to witness Sally Ride’s first flight on the Space Shuttle. I got Buzz Aldrin to autograph a copy of the Case For Mars program that I attended. The American space program is one of the reasons I chose aerospace as a career.
I can name the crew of every Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo flight. I’m old enough to remember watching Apollo 17, the Apollo-Soyuz test program, Skylab, Viking, Voyager.
But if one man had been responsible for the ongoing funding of those missions, and had as his personal mission to harm millions of innocent people for no reason other than bigotry, I would be happy to see it all stopped.
You can talk about Wernher von Braun, of course, and the United States could have been successful without him (with more time). Difference is, Wernher von Braun never advocated Nazi ideology after being rescued by the USA in September 1945, just after the end of WW2. I could not find if von Braun ever explicitly renounced nazism. But Musk today blabs nonstop anti-Semitic crap and pro-Russian talking points while the USA lets him launch our NRO payloads.
The stars and planets will still be there when we mature enough to realize what’s more important – thrills or lives. And yes, in the case of Musk, those things are mutually exclusive.
Until he’s no longer in the picture, no longer pulling strings, no longer setting out to harm innocent people, I cheer for every single one of his rockets to fail. Yes, that includes the manned ones. Those riding them ought to know better. If they do know and still climb aboard, they simply do not care about their fellow human beings and only care about their own self-aggrandizement. Everyone who helps him is culpable for the hatred he propagates. There’s no avoiding it. It’s time to grow up.
DaveH@25:
Yeah. Even setting Musk aside, I think a lot of people just don’t appreciate what a difference a manufacturing model can make. For instance, if we were living in a time when, say, automobiles were astronomically expensive one-offs, full of customized parts and handcrafted woodwork, deliberately wrecking a few for the sake of crash-test data or marketing or whatever would seem like sacrilege. Not so much with a mass-manufactured Ford Model-T. (Not to invoke the ghost of yet another over-rated anti-Semitic monster…)
So ditto for rockets. If you’re used to thinking of rockets as singular, hard-to-produce, astronomically expensive items, then risking one on a not-absolutely-sure thing just to get a few lines of test data seems like a failure.
But SpaceX is literally scrapping multiple rockets for every one that’s actually going in the air. Firing one off now and then might almost be worth it to them just to clear a pile of obsolete hardware off the launch gantry. But of course, that’s not all they get from it: it’s also invaluable practical experience in ground and flight operations, and the best kind of full integration systems test. In short, exactly the kind of all-up testing is something more “sophisticated” operations like ULA actually struggle with. And since the rocket is just another production-line test, and is already sitting there, SpaceX is getting all that for more or less just the price of a tank of fuel.
As an aside, our cultural aversion to (partial) public failure is a problem that goes way beyond rockets. It’s holding back innovation in multiple spheres, including things like social policy. There’s any number of really important things — public housing, health insurance delivery, drug rehabilitation, child poverty, primary school curricula, UBI — where a few small scale trials (even “failed” ones) of various ideas would give us orders of magnitude more actionable policy information than 100 years worth of intellectual masturbation by think tanks.
But there aren’t nearly enough legislators or directors of government agencies willing to give it a try. Because even a partial success would by definition also be a partial failure, and they’d subsequently be raked over the coals for “wasting” public resources. We’d rather spend generations limping along with an objectively failed system rather than risk failing again in a different way — because obviously ten failures is worse than one, right?
(It really is a cultural issue: there are places — Singapore the standout example — where experimentation is encouraged to a greater degree in some areas. IIUC, the outcomes there are, predictably, quite a bit better.)
DaveH @ 25, what time machine was used for this feat?
NASA was formed after the US had its first operational ICBM and the second, the Titan being already in the pipeline. So, the mythical NASA blowing up rockets is just that, a myth. NACA was the mixed military and civilian agency and NACA was not NASA. It’s like saying that the USCG is the US Department of the Treasury, because they originated under revenue cutters.
And I’ve repeatedly posted a link just to the Saturn series, NASA’s first rocket after Gemini folded and used for the Apollo and Skylab programs. Complete with a mission list and a full dozen were launched before one exploded in orbit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_(rocket_family)
It wasn’t until AS-203 that one exploded. That, due to the nature of the test, where the oxygen tank was intentionally allowed to vent, to test to see if a bulkhead would fail, which it did, tearing a second oxygen tank loose. Yet, previously flew 11 times without such a failure. AS-202 flew two months later and resulted in the Saturn stack being man rated.
And AS-201 – 203 were flown during the stand down due to the SpaceX style rush to get things going, safety be damned that incinerated three astronauts inside of Apollo 1.
Soyuz 1 being a SpaceX style mission as well, smashed, then incinerated one cosmonaut, due to paint holding the main parachute in, preventing deployment, so striking the ground at terminal velocity.
Others might have noted above, but one “problem” with our viewpoint is we’re very influenced by NASA’s safety first testing attitudes. Get it working and many of the stress-testing kinks out on the ground FIRST before actually trying to put the thing in the air.
Space-X is a ‘test it in the air’ facility. What we call failures because ground-testing didn’t find it are things they are actively looking for.
A very different mind-set. Basically it is like rockets on ‘ALPHA’ branch testing, where NASA would at least wait for the BETA before trying it on the pad.
Raging Bee@26: Sounds like a safer, more sensible, and possibly cheaper way to test new rocket designs before a big public launch.
Cheaper, yes. And part of any sensible testing program. But testing a component on a stand is by definition not the same thing as testing all of the hardware together in actual flight. It’s the latter that really matters, particularly for safety. The more the better, AFAICT. The safety record of, say, Falcon 9 vs Space Shuttle is a testament to that.
My biggest problem with SpaceX is that Musk is its supreme commander. The first Starship launch destroyed the launchpad as well as clobbering distant objects because the rich man-baby overrode the experts because he wanted to save money and thus he “reasoned” that the blast from the rocket launch was no big deal. That mistake was obviously avoidable, so Musk’s part in it couldn’t be covered up. How many other boneheaded decisions overriding the experts will Musk make, and will we even find out about them when the next avoidable disaster happens? No one man, even an emotionally mature expert (Musk is neither), should have the power to impose his will on any space program. SpaceX should be grounded until Musk sells it. Decision control regulations must be devised and made legally mandatory.
wzrd1@29 NASA was formed after the US had its first operational ICBM and the second, the Titan being already in the pipeline.
That’s obviously not really a good-faith reading of DaveH’s comment. “NASA” is frequently used as a stand-in for the whole general US space program whatsis, not entirely inaccurately given that civilian predecessors like NACA were around, and NASA certainly inherited most of their technological position from the strides made in military programs like Redstone and Atlas and…Saturn I.
(I’m not even sure you’re “technically” correct. What DaveH actually said was:
– “in the 1950s” (NASA = 1958, so technically correct),
– that there were military applications for their work (yes),
– and that this dried up once the military demands were satiated by “good enough” ICBMs and a sufficiency of nationalistic dick-waving.
The last one seems like the only arguable part. But ISTM to be at least theoretically defensible. It sort of depends on what one defines as a “good enough” ICBM. And it would just require a pretty long digression into the political and technological basis of e.g., the Minuteman program to adjudicate. Note that even if we determined that ICBM technology existed on an entirely parallel track, ultimately receiving no contributions of value from NASA’s efforts, it’s still possible that policy makers supported NASA insofar as they thought it might contribute to the military programs.)
Ed Peters: #QElon Musk is also the guy who routinely blames the drivers of his “self-driving” cars when they crash, on the grounds that since the drivers all tried to take control of their cars just before they crashed themselves, therefore the drivers were fully in control of their cars when they crashed, therefore the crashes are not the fault of his “fully-self-driving” gizmos.
NO ONE with such a childish, cowardly, irresponsible and uncaring mindset should EVER be in charge of ANY business involving rockets.
Raging Bee:
Um, he actually created SpaceX, you know, back in 2002.
No Elon, no SpaceX.
And he has been running it ever since.
jack lecou@33:
I am a scientist by trade, and how grant proposals, scholarships, etc. that have to be filled with every cringy buzzword de jour or vaguely hitched to some commercial need to even have a chance of being funded rather than being adjudicated on the basis of scientific merit is honestly the single greatest reason I am considering leaving professional science.
NASA, its predecessors, and all the allied scientific groups (e.g. universities) were riding that same kind of thing. The last director of NACA (and also first deputy director of NASA) Hugh Dryden famous said that “It is of great urgency and importance to our country both from consideration of our prestige as a nation as well as military necessity that this challenge be met by an energetic program of research and development for the conquest of space”. That was referring to the creation of NASA. Kennedy, of “we will go to the moon” fame, actually thought that a manned spaceflight program was a waste of money, and instead campaigned in the presidential election on the so-called “missile gap”. He only went in on a moonshot after Gagarin’s flight, when he saw the political advantages of it. The one thing he unequivocally funded initially was the development of heavy-life boosters (Saturn grew out of the US Army missile program, which was transferred to the Air Force, and then quickly to the new NASA), because of the obvious military applications for heavy lift capabilities, not just of ICBMs but also of communications and spy satellites. That the Saturn program was only ever used for Apollo and Skylab launches is more to do with the recognition of the superiority of solid fuel rockets for ICBMs, and the shrinking of those spy and communications satellites removing the need for super-heavy lift vehicles. Saturn was most definitely originally sold as being useful for military applications as a descendant of the Redstone rocket family, and then transitioned into being used to compete with the Soviets when the ICBM program “split off” in the late 50s.
Uh, no.
The space shuttle destroyed itself twice. over its 130-ish launches. That’s AFTER it was certified and man-rated as safe by NASA. There were many problems accidents and explosions during the development of the shuttle and its predecessors, the Mercury and Apollo missions.
Since the Falcon-9 was certified there have been 0 failures in 200-ish launches. Zero.
The Falcon-9 is the most accident-free, reliable rocket ever developed by anyone, anywhere. And it’s the cheapest. And it flies a meaningful payload. Sure, it’s not the Falcon-Heavy or the Saturn-5 or the Energia, but most of what you want to get up to orbit can be placed on a Falcon-9.
MEANWHILE, the ESA has been trying to design a replacement for the Ariane-5. The Ariane-6 is at least 6 years behind schedule, has never even attempted a launch, and yet has consumed a huge amount more than the Falcon-9 development program without ever putting a single payload into orbit. Rocket programs start, test, spend WADS of cash, and then fail all the time. Governments then declare a “new” program for a “new” rocket that reuses all the research from the previous one and still manages to waste scads of money without fielding anything.
This is what ArsTechnica had to say not long ago:
The old way of testing favoured by governments is not cheaper in any way. ESA has already spent $4 billion to develop Ariane 6, and if it’s eventually successful, the best case scenario is that it launches 6 times per year, with 80 to 100 total launches before the program is discontinued.
The cost to launch customers will be 60% of just continuing with the Ariane 5, but it turns out that that’s because of two things:
1) the launch price will not include any amortization of the research and development. (SpaceX includes such amortization and only spent a little over 1 Billion dollars, barely 1/4th what ESA spent)
and
2) Every Ariane 6 launch will be government-subsidized. The subsidy is fixed per year. If they reach 6 launches per year, then the cost per launch will be exactly the same as if they had continued the Ariane 5 program. — ignoring the $4B spent on research and development which would have been saved. But many people think that the Ariane 6 will not reach 6 launches per year, which means the fixed annual subsidy would represent even a larger % of the cost per launch.
And, of course, there’s a reason why the ESA won’t have many customers per year for their launches: even with the annual subsidies and free R&D (well, free to the purchasers of launch services), the cost per kilogram on the Ariane 6 will be dramatically higher than on the Falcon 9. Literally everyone who can get in SpaceX’s queue will be heading there because they have a track record of 200 consecutive safe, successful launches AND prices that are a fraction of their competitors. Who wouldn’t want to pay 60% to 90% less to get a better, more reliable, well-proven product?
Now with all this you would think that ESA is at least getting an advanced rocket. But nope. It is an entire generation behind the Falcon-9. It will be 0% reusable. It will be more harmful to the environment based on fuels used. It is a solid incremental improvement over the Ariane-5 (or so I’m told) but it does nothing new except upgrade A5 subsystems in ways that are hoped to be more reliable, but since they’ve never been flown, might have as-yet undetected faults or risks.
(link: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/11/ariane-6-cost-and-delays-bring-european-launch-industry-to-a-breaking-point/ )
Astronauts have burned up on the launch pad and died on launch and died on reentry using NASA’s “cheaper” “safer” testing system.
Musk is a Nazi, and he’s selfish enough to have made himself a billionaire and kept the money. I don’t like him and he’s evil. And there are more workplace injuries at SpaceX per 1,000 employees than at other space companies. There are definitely problems, and I don’t think he treats his employees well or prioritizes their safety.
But he does prioritize the safety of his customer’s money, and for his evil focus on money he has managed to develop a program that does not rate launch services as safe until they are, and then sets records for reliability and environmental performance.
He’s such a fucker I can’t believe that I’m writing this, but when you say that his testing system is safer and cheaper, well, it just isn’t. No rocket, EVER, has turned a profit until the Falcon 9. Operating costs, manufacturing costs, amortized R&D — you combine all that with the limited life span of these programs and the high failure rate and none of them came close to this. Yet the Falcon-9 was developed with 1/4 of the money of the ESA A6 and it actually developed new technological capabilities — powered landings and rocket reuse — that are lightyears ahead of what ESA is hoping it might do someday if the A6 ever gets off the ground, which isn’t guaranteed.
No, it’s not cheaper to do it the NASA/ESA way. No it isn’t even safer in terms of number of rockets exploded after testing is declared over and regular operations have been declared to begin. SpaceX has also never killed an astronaut. On the ground the stats say that they’re not as safe as other employers, but it just doesn’t make any sense to say that they’re unsafe based on their launch history.
I don’t know where you got your information, but hate Musk because he’s evil, not because SpaceX isn’t as good as large, conservative government rocket programs. On nearly every measure, they’re better.
DaveH@36: That the Saturn program was only ever used for Apollo and Skylab launches is more to do with the recognition of the superiority of solid fuel rockets for ICBMs, and the shrinking of those spy and communications satellites removing the need for super-heavy lift vehicles.
That certainly does explain the abject lack of interest in going down the road toward something like Sea Dragon, or even smaller but high-cadence (re-usable) launch capability. The usual explanation at least for the former is simply “there wasn’t a need for so much payload”, which always confused me as a kid, because… Hello? O’Neill habitats? Moon bases? Orbital power satellites?
But, yeah. The real answer is simply that that stuff wasn’t actually ever anyone’s goal (not the people writing the checks, anyway). Nobody needs missiles that big. And missiles certainly don’t need to land. Meanwhile, spy satellites got small, and didn’t need crews for their capabilities. The existing tech was good enough and cheap enough (for the DoD), so why go further?
It kind of makes you think: what would a program with even a fraction of the resources that the combined 60s/70s US space program had been able to accomplish if they were actually interested in space?
I guess SpaceX and it’s big, cheap, re-usable rockets is probably a partial answer to that. The remaining parts are what could be accomplished with a decent budget, and if the organization weren’t run by a shit-for-brains neo-Nazi edgelord…
Crip Dyke @37
Thank you for posting that. I’m not familiar enough to opine on much of this stuff but enjoy reading the back and forth here. I assume other lurkers benefit.
Well, Sea Dragon got cancelled when the Future Products division was shut down during a major budget cut. It was already a validated design and only needed to be built, even if scaled down to an Apollo + level or so. But, money talks and Congress controls the money. It had been scaled way down for smaller rockets and tested, proving both design and that it was simpler, more reliable in many ways than the smart booster Saturn design.
Oddly, they chose an inefficient testing method of proving, ground testing, then once validated, used it under water and it worked perfectly – in under a year.
Just as did major design changes between Apollo 13 and Apollo 14, in the same general time span.
As for Apollo explosions, I can only find two, AS-203 and Apollo 13. With Apollo 13 having a fuel shelf that was dropped, plus switches rated 24 volts having over double the voltage applied to them and a really poor design of flammable insulation inside of an oxygen tank.
Oh, the Sea Dragon was to reuse the engines after each flight, after of course an inspection and rebuild. The missile skin being steel, could be recycled.
Oh, a bit of trivia. In the Saturn series of spacecraft, during Apollo, there was a recurring nightmare of a problem present until July 1968, pogo oscillation. The movement of the fuel and oxidizer (largely the O2) lines would cause decreases and surges of power in the engines. This actually caused a couple of engine shutdown incidents during a flight, resulting in the software diverting the fuel and oxygen to the remaining engines and burning them a bit longer to achieve orbit.
The fix was achieved by modeling the engine performance, figuring out what was going on, then applying the fix on a testbed until the final fix resolved the problem. Per some, that was the wrong solution and random shit should’ve been done until the spacecraft blew up with a crew or was fixed or something, as ground based testing and modeling was monetarily wasteful.
https://www.nasa.gov/history/50-years-ago-solving-the-pogo-effect/#:~:text=On%20July%2018%2C%201968%2C%20NASA%20announced%20that%20engineers,the%20rocket%20experienced%20longitudinal%20oscillations%20called%20%E2%80%9Cpogo%20effect.%E2%80%9D
Rocket science is a trifle complex at times. ;)
The rest of the time, it’s damned complicated.
With pogo oscillation, the problem only showed up when flying. Every other major issue was resolved before flight via ground testing.
According to one FAA report, the Starship fuel and oxidizer yield in a near ground blast would have 100 tons of TNT yield, three times the yield of the Davy Crockett nuclear rocket. Kind of bad news if that went off course and blew over a town like one PRC Long March did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_708
wzrd1@41 The [pogo] fix was achieved by modeling the engine performance, figuring out what was going on, then applying the fix on a testbed until the final fix resolved the problem.
I mean, that’s one way to put it. A couple other things jumped out at me from your linked article though:
What do you call that? A flock? A herd? A gaggle? Whatever it is, 1,000 is a lot of engineers. And it’s not even clear if that number includes everyone involved — technicians and construction crews on test sites, for example.
What this tells me is mostly just that NASA of that era had a lot of expert manpower to throw at problems. But in an alternate universe where NASA was a little lighter on staff but had Saturn Vs coming off a production line faster than they could find places to stash them, a different testing approach might have suggested itself. I daresay there’s no a priori way to say which is universally correct.
IOW, I doubt you want to try to make the case that throwing 1,000 engineers at a problem is really a generally applicable solution. Nor that it’s either cost effective (or, for that matter, effective) in every circumstance.
That’s kind of interesting, isn’t it? It’s almost like:
1. having real flight data was indispensable (I imagine downright crucial when it came to determining things like the actual resonant frequencies of the rocket stack — which would be needed not only to determine the fix, but to develop accurate ground-based test harnesses); and
2. NASA was apparently flying test hardware before they were certain that they had every single potentially fatal problem solved.
Speaking of — your article talks about the big push to solve Saturn V’s pogo issue in order to make it safe before crew flew on Apollo 8. So if it was solved for Apollo 8, it’s really weird that pogo issues caused a premature engine shutdown on Apollo 13. It’s almost like:
1. ground-based modelling didn’t actually entirely solve the problem; and
2. NASA sent up not only rockets but crew on hardware they didn’t actually know to be completely sound.
Make of that what you will.
wzrd1@41 Per some, that was the wrong solution and random shit should’ve been done until the spacecraft blew up with a crew or was fixed or something, as ground based testing and modeling was monetarily wasteful.
I suppose if I wanted to stoop to the same level I could reply with some pithy remark about how “no one learns to ride a bike by simulating it on a computer” or something. But then I’d sound just as stupid as that sentence is. The fact is, I suspect you know perfectly well that nobody is saying that. And strawmen are beneath you.
If it does really need to be said: yes, there is a obviously place for simulation and ground testing. SpaceX didn’t start by throwing random plumbing parts in the air or something. But as we’ve learned above, there is also a place for aggressive and comprehensive flight testing, preferably before you put a crew onboard.
Somewhere in the middle, there’s an optimum. We might never know exactly where that is in all situations, but what we do know is that SpaceX’s approach seems to be working pretty well for them. Certainly better than NASA’s approach has so far.
@ 27. Robert Westbrook :
See my previous reply on the last Musk-SpaceX thread :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/11/18/sympathy-for-linda-yaccarino/comment-page-1/#comment-2202235
to your extremely ugly and not cool wish for NASA and ESA astronauts (public servants albeit atypical ones) to die to satisfy your fury at the man whose craft they are flying on.
PS. When it comes to your “grow up” line at the end, take your own advice here, Robert Westbrook.
Sometimes you do have to settle for less and compromise on getting some of what you want rather than what you’d ideally most like. Sometimes you have to work for and live with people you don’t like and wish you didn’t but sometimes that’s life and NOT something where throwing a temper tanty or sabotaging things or cheering for the worst will help. Work to change things where possible, work to make things better absolutely but don’t just cheer on and support disaster out of nose severing face-spiting, can’t get my first ideal preference I so refuse to allow the second best choice to happen and thus get the worst least desireable outcome instead-ness. Yes, grow up indeed!
Once again, I’d ideally prefer Musk to NOT be in charge of SpaceX – to be removed from power and position as CEO there and jailed but that ain’t happening is it? So is it better to still have SpaceX and see it suceed than not? Definitely!
You remind me of all the hyper-
partisantreasonous destructive Repugs saying the USA should be & will be destroyed just becuase Biden or Obama is POTUS rather Trump or whoever they prefer here.Musk ain’t SpaceX. Its NOT all about him and is much bigger and better than him. Oh & SpaceX isn’t the human space exploration program either. Be a mature adult enough to distinguish between them please. Or, don’t as you choose, I guess since it’s up to you & spose it doesn’t actually make that much difference but sheesh. Seriously dude?! Disgusted the first time I saw that and even more disgusted now that you’d unthinkingly repeat it again.
Strawperson fallacy on your part there. Its not just “so cool” but something that could literally save our planet eg from asteroid impacts and develop technology that materially improves everyone’s lives. Sapce etchnology gets adapted and has spin-offs and serendiptious positive impacts in all sorts of ways – exhibit A : the Earthrise image inspiring modern environmentalism :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise#Legacy
No. Musk is a single horrible excuse for a human being and NOT ” the marvel of exploration” just a toxuic billionaire deluded by privilege and affluence individual. Musk isn’t ecven SapceX let alone what you wrongly claimed he is there.
So you’re Anakin Skywalker here saying with me or my enemy huh?
Again, Musk ain’t SpaceX, just its CEO. CEO’s can be removed and replaced -and in thia case I think they should be. A CEO is NOT the company or those who work for it or what they do. Too obvs? Apparently not for you..
@43 StevoR:
Interesting that you recast my pointing out harm to marginalized groups as something trivial. Just my personal preference, like a pineapple on pizza debate! But I guess you have to characterize the danger as something trivial so you can minimize the harms to those groups and still cheer on your entertainment at their expense.
Spare me the old lifeboat argument. It’s been thoroughly debunked.
You apparently missed the word “perpetrator” in my preceding paragraph.
Musk financially gains from its success. His financial gains are used to perpetrate harm against transgendered people, Jews, Ukrainians, victims of vaccine-preventable illnesses, and non-white people for whom he has platformed advocates of genocide.
You simply must convince yourself of the exclusivity of SpaceX and Musk’s goals, because the alternative is that you’ve been cheering for the enrichment and furtherance of power for a Nazi. The cognitive dissonance in your mind must be staggering.
@5. Marcus Ranum :
LOL! Yes!
Also a success becuase it made progress going further, higher and successfully separating stages this time too.
Its how SpaceX tends to suceed – eventually. See again the video with the retruning boosters landing here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/11/18/sympathy-for-linda-yaccarino/#comment-2202024
Its also something thats not completely unique to SpaceX as the old clip from The Ruight Stuff of NASA rocket failures to launch shows – 17 seconds mark onwards & 2 min 33 secs total here.
Plus the list here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Summary_of_achievements
which again, posted before but deserevs to remembered. SpaceX has worked wonders and has and will continue to build and fly amazing machiens that ultimately advance all of us species~wide.
@ 44. Robert Westbrook :
That is NOT what I am doing here. I am saying SpaceX is necessary and important for our future and worth supporting whilst Musk is NOT and I do NOT deny that as a individual person he is a douchy, toxic, horrid excuse for a human and a terrible boss who needs to be removed from power. At SpaceX and X and in general.
The compromise here I am referring to is do we cheer on and support what the workers and rocket scientists at SpaceX do whilst knowing Musk is their CEO? I say yes because it helps SpaceX & Humanity in general despite Musk, regrettably, for now being their CEO and again, SpaceX and NASA and human space exploration are intertwined. Musk is a small part of this -hopefully soon a part relegated tohistory indisgrace and I think you are missing the bigger picture here. Again, you need to separate Musk as individual CEO from SapceX as teh company them just as the Repugs (& Berniebros) need to separate the USA and its ideals as a nation from say Obama / Biden being in charge of it. A nationis bigger andmore imporantt than its President anjusta s a company isbigger adn more important than a CEO. Again, an analogy and truism that I thought was pretty obvs to most but here you are.
In your opinion and mind anyhow rather than reality but NOT what I specifically write as my example here which was saving our planet from ASTEROID IMPACTS. Caps for the slow of reading here. (& here, I thought I was struggling gven it’s 2 a.m. already where I am & I should be well and truly asleep already….)
No. It puzzled me since it seemed totally the wrong word choice for one of the two tings you were mentioning. Its like you said oranges are a marvel of fruit growing but then a orange pip is a perpetrator of stuff.
It didn’t make sense in the context so ididn’;t want toget into needlessly pointing out wher eyoustuffed up bmaybe by auto-correct or something.
So okay, Musk is a perpetrator of a lot of damaging corrosive fascist, horrific things – yeah. But Musk isn’t the totally separate thing of “the marvel of exploration” as you tried to compare him with.
Anything Musk’s gains with SpaceX are offset with his losses elsewhere
TwitterX and he’s no longer the world’s richest man and his reputation is in free fall. Musk isn’t gaining much financially I think and your asserting it doesn’t make it so. Musks’ wealth doesn’t intrest me. SpaceX making progress that can helps us all does. I prioritise the latter & oppose the former. Starship flying successfully gives NASA and humanity something great and worthwhile. Again, you need to separate these things and again NOT wish for the deaths of innocent people doing their jobs as NASA astronauts which again, disgusting of you and soemthing you notably have NOT addressed here.Well I am very clearly NOT doing the latter whilst you have been, well, see last sentence before the quote. I want Musk removed from power and stripped of all his welath and influence. I also want SpaceX to be successful under new ownership. Reckon Ive been pretty durn clear about that.
Not so much as the staggeringly oblivious, unnuanced, untrue, black and white failure to distinguish X (hah!) from Y Musk = all of SpaceX and SpaceX = only Musk despite him absolutely NOT being in your mind.Do you confuse any and every model T car itself for (also a nazi supporter) Henry Ford in person dude?
jack lecou @ 42, thank you for making my point. There has to be a middle ground. You can’t prove a system without flight, but you also eliminate major problems and risks found by strenuous ground testing first. Not just keep tossing things up into the sky to blow up and rain burning missile components down and hope you don’t nuke a village in the process.
Well, unless you’re China.
As for 1000 individuals in the working group, you do realize that working groups include contractors and subcontractors, right? With Apollo 13, they literally awakened 10000 people to work on various aspects of the problem – before they even had a clear-ish idea of what the problem was.
As for Apollo 13’s engine shutdown, yeah, mitigation isn’t always 100%. I actually believe that they never did fully resolve pogo entirely in the Saturn V. The other stages, yes, but V was a special beast and a true monster it was.
As for stashing rockets wherever they could find a place for them, yeah, while I’m not a fan of just in time delivery, I’m also far from being a fan of buying in bulk a test platform (the Apollo always was a test vehicle), only to have to tear the damned things apart and rebuild them with improvements nearly monthly. Another issue that reared its razor toothed head in Apollo 13, missed voltage changes that overvoltaged components.
QC being another issue, as the subcontractor kept churning out assemblies with the wrong voltage switches, despite receiving the production change notice.
Frankly, with the haste of the entire Apollo program, I’m honestly amazed that we didn’t kill a few crews in space and actually made a survivable landing and getaway (yeah, I intended that) from the moon. Pushing the bleeding edge of the technologies of the time is a massive understatement.
And don’t get me started on the sheer lunacy of Carl Sagan’s earliest assigned project, calculating a lunar thermonuclear detonation’s effects. He determined that it’d have been an embarrassment, as moon big, nukes tiny in comparison.
Well, he was more polite than I’d have been with the idiots. I’d have been more like, “OK, imagine a giant skillet the size of NYC, you fire a black powder musket somewhere while standing in it, have an observer where they can see the entire skillet and have them identify where the gunshot was fired from. There’s no air on the moon to get all glowy and excited, think that Starfish Prime would have a 3.5 mile fireball in the air, but was barely noticeable in orbit, where there’s 100 times more atmosphere than on the moon. So, any such demonstration would not only be an embarrassment, but a complete waste of tax dollars and a warhead”.
It’s a sheer mystery to me why the state department won’t hire me…
wzrd1@47: There has to be a middle ground. You can’t prove a system without flight, but you also eliminate major problems and risks found by strenuous ground testing first. Not just keep tossing things up into the sky to blow up and rain burning missile components down and hope you don’t nuke a village in the process.
Sure. And I think for the most part SpaceX’s style of “hardware rich” development is, largely, taking exactly that middle ground. You haven’t actually demonstrated otherwise.
This may largely come down to a difference of opinion on risk quantification. Where you see “rains of burning missile fragments” and the specter of vaporized villages, I see flight termination safety measures working as intended, and the resulting debris falling harmlessly into the ocean with no recorded injuries whatsoever.
Still, I think there are objectively some problems with your implicit assumption that the current flight testing, particularly this last flight, is unnecessary. After all, you’ve conceded that real flight data was ultimately necessary in Apollo for at least one flight issue — the pogo problem. But you haven’t engaged with the fact that the intricate staging/deceleration/relight/etc. sequence that SpaceX is working out with these flights largely falls into the same bucket. Indeed, pogo is child’s play in comparison. NASA never even attempted things like powered first stage returns, largely because of that complexity: not a few people in the conventional space industry had previously dismissed that kind of thing as flat out impossible. The kind of thing the now venerable Falcon 9 does routinely — although it took quite a few fully integrated test flights to work out the details.
Maybe it’s your impression that they’re just flying by the seat of their pants for all that, but I suspect that in fact there are plenty of elaborate simulations and so forth that go into the flight sequence planning and piloting systems. At this point, there are likely some SpaceX engineers who are some of the foremost experts in the world on, say, working out what to expect from fluids sloshing around in turbopumps while making throttle adjustments and aggressive hypersonic course maneuvers.
But the simple fact is, even more than with pogo, there’s only so much you can do to predict those dynamics from an office chair. And there’s simply no possible ground test stand that can reproduce even a fraction of what’s going on all the systems as, e.g., the lower stage is pushed back by the upper stage engine and attempts to turn around and relight. The only way to know if it’s going to work is to fly it and collect more data.
As for stashing rockets wherever they could find a place for them, yeah, while I’m not a fan of just in time delivery, I’m also far from being a fan of buying in bulk a test platform (the Apollo always was a test vehicle), only to have to tear the damned things apart and rebuild them with improvements nearly monthly.
I think you’re missing the point. You see “buying a test platform in bulk”, others see “tooling up a production line”. IMO, there’s an actual qualitative difference in how Starship and Saturn V were/are produced — and how design modifications are incorporated — and it has a major impact on both the testing program and eventually the possible future launch cadence and capacity.
Looking back at Apollo, not counting the three ground test articles, there were a grand total of only 15 Saturn V vehicles, all built in a single production run. Fully 13 of those flew — and the other two would have flown, had the remaining Apollo flights not been cancelled. Yes, 13/13 is a good success rate, but that’s not the point here. The point is that each Saturn V was a rare and precious jewel. There were only 15 of them in all history, and they were at least planning to shoot off every single one. If something like a battery bus was redesigned, they were reworked (in, as you say, an expensive and potentially error-prone process) rather than simply being scrapped and replaced by a new unit with improvements already built in.
Contrast this with SpaceX. They will soon have cranked out more Super Heavy prototypes than the number of production S-ICs that ever existed: 12 already finished, 4 more currently under construction. And AFAIK there’s no plan to slow down after that. Upper stages are already at #31 and counting. They’re cranking out Raptor engines at the rate of an engine per day (in 2022, and according to NASA not Musk).
More importantly, 5 out of those 12 finished Super Heavys have already been retired or scrapped as they were superseded by improved models. Not refit or reworked, just literally busted down to a pile of steel sheets and sent back to the metal yard for recycling and a store credit. Depending on the findings from the latest test, #10, 11 and 12 might well meet the same fate (as #8 did), with any design fixes instead being rolled out to later models on the production line.
The upshot of that is that SpaceX spends most of its time building new, finished ships, not reworking old ones. They’re not constrained to a certain scope for design changes, or coming up with a rework plan. And they still always manage to have 2 or 3 ships finished and ready to launch whenever a test flight is warranted. By the time one of these designs is finalized, all the kinks will be worked out of the production line.
Basically, Apollo hiked out to the creek, filled 15 buckets by hand, and then decided it was too difficult to ever go back for more, let alone spill that much during testing. And they were probably right, with that kind of production methodology, it would have been astronomical. In contrast, SpaceX is priming a pipeline that will have bottomless Starship vehicles, on tap.
Frankly, with the haste of the entire Apollo program, I’m honestly amazed that we didn’t kill a few crews in space and actually made a survivable landing and getaway (yeah, I intended that) from the moon. Pushing the bleeding edge of the technologies of the time is a massive understatement.
I suspect one of the missing pieces there is the degree of overbuild. It’s the old aphorism about how any idiot can build a bridge that doesn’t fall down — it takes engineering to build a bridge that just barely doesn’t fall down.
Especially after early failures like Vanguard, I think Apollo era NASA wasn’t trying to be fancy — they were under pressure, in a hurry, and mostly just trying to build a bridge that didn’t fall down. Which is not actually that difficult. Simply make everything thicker, heavier, more redundant, more powerful. If it gets too heavy, throw on a third stage. Etc. Everything is correspondingly more expensive that way, of course, but it meant that Saturn V was built like a tank. I shouldn’t wonder if stresses equivalent to those early pogo excursions wouldn’t have simply resulted in a cloud of SpaceX style debris cloud if Saturn had been built a little lighter.
As for 1000 individuals in the working group, you do realize that working groups include contractors and subcontractors, right? With Apollo 13, they literally awakened 10000 people to work on various aspects of the problem – before they even had a clear-ish idea of what the problem was.
It doesn’t really matter who their employer is. The point is that I’m not sure SpaceX has 1,000 engineers in the entire Starship program, let alone to assign to a single problem. Wikipedia says SpaceXs total employment — which is everyone from HR to janitors — is only ~13,000. And it’s not my impression they subcontract much, at least not for core engineering stuff like that.
Obviously we do have to make allowance for, e.g., how much few people it takes to spin up a fluid dynamics simulation on a computer these days vs a bunch of guys thumbing slide rules. But even so, given what SpaceX has accomplished, those numbers suggest to me that either A) everyone at SpaceX is just a genius, or B) there might be favorable tradeoffs to be made between engineering time and testing frequency.
@ 3. wzrd1 :
Yup see :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguard_TV-3 & here on youtube
Weird how instead of generalities I’m the only one to make specific claims about reliability — namely that Falcon-9 made over 200 safe and successful orbital launches in a row, something no other rocket has been able to do. Indeed the Falcon-9 has had a grand total of zero accidents after being rated safe to fly.
It’s also interesting how I mentioned that the space shuttle blew up TWICE after it was rated man-safe (the highest reliability and safety rating) by NASA, in only ~130 flights. If the NASA system worked better than the SpaceX system, why couldn’t they manage 200 safe flights with a craft that earned their highest safety and reliability rating?
These are facts, not assessments or opinions, and yet the people who want to hate on SpaceX seem gleeful to take on others’ assessments or opinions about safety and reliability while remaining entirely allergic to these facts.
Let’s throw out some other facts. Only ONE other orbital system repeatedly used hot staging. That system discarded the first stage boosters. in other words, when that booster system was fully successful, it looked EXACTLY like the test that SpaceX just ran — the second stage lights off, then separation occurs, then the second stage leaves the atmosphere while the first stage blows up.
That orbital system was Soviet/Russian, and required quite a lot of testing with I’m not sure how many accidents before it was considered reliable. And in that system, again, they did not attempt to recover the first stage, much less reuse the first stage.
There have only ever been 2 rocket programs where a powered stage was reused: NASA’s space shuttle and Falcon-9. The space shuttle had a failure rate of about 1.7% after being given the highest safety rating. Since SpaceX was rated cargo-safe, it has had a failure rate of 0%.
There has only been 1 rocket program EVER where a primary first stage was reused — Falcon-9.
There has only been 2 rocket programs ever where any stage made a powered return flight to its designated landing area — Falcon-9 and Falcon-Heavy, both by SpaceX.
Falcon-Heavy is made up of three semi-independent cores connected together. Each of those cores is, essentially, a barely-modified Falcon-9.
The Starship first stage is attempting to integrate a technology that has only ever been implemented once, and on a throwaway rocket, lighting off the engines of the second stage while the first stage is still attached without blowing up the first stage during separation, with a technology that has only been implemented twice, Falcon-9 like powered return (the second example is the Electron rocket that has less than 1/40th of the capacity and cannot be used to pass beyond LEO), with a technology that has only been implemented once, Falcon-9 like reuse of a recovered first stage (Electron hasn’t managed this, even with being a mini-rocket), with a technology that has only been implemented three times, the huge payload-to-orbit capacity of SaturnV, Energia, and the shuttle, if you include the mass of the shuttle itself as a payload, with a technology that has never been implemented before, the use of many engine cores rather than a few giant ones (a few giant engines being a strategy that simplifies testing but increases risk).
Note that none of the actual tech of Saturn V or the shuttle or Energia is being reused here. And the Electron is a small rocket developed AFTER Falcon-9 which is dramatically behind the Falcon series in capability and development cycle.
Musk is evil. SpaceX is doing brand new things (33 engine cores! Powered return and reuse!) that have never been attempted by another entity in history.
Yes, they do simulations. Yes, they do ground tests. Yes, they also do flight tests. And yes, they blow shit up.
Musk being incredibly, thoroughly evil does not change the fact that no one had ever done what SpaceX got done just with its early testing program of Falcon-9, powered return of a boost stage. And with all the resources of NASA and the ESA, no one has even attempted it except SpaceX and RocketLab, with RocketLab testing it at a size and capacity that vastly simplifies the task. And RocketLab has barely recovered a boost stage. It hasn’t even attempted the reuse of one, not even at their much small, simpler scale.
Powered return becomes exponentially more difficult as you scale rockets up, which is why RocketLab tried it with a 500kg rocket years after SpaceX succeeded with a 20,000kg+ rocket and no one else has tried it at all.
NASA and the ESA are terrified of even attempting this development. The ESA keeps talking about developing a returnable/reusable rocket but refuses to even try because if they commit they don’t think that they can get it working within a time frame that allows them to be independent of commercial launch services (read: SpaceX, who owns the commercial launch services market).
Maybe ESA would surprise themselves and get a returnable, reusable rocket up and running in less than a decade, but they don’t think that they can do it, and they’re incredibly experienced, have infinite money, and already have manufacturing and testing facilities up and running with decades of in-house expertise in doing this stuff.
MUSK IS EVIL.
That is entirely independent of whether SpaceX has been a more successful developer of rockets and new orbital technologies than NASA or ESA or anyone else over the last 20 years.
Is there a balance to be struck between simulations, ground tests, and flight tests? OF COURSE.
Has SpaceX taken the optimal path or have they erred? It is literally impossible to know if the path they have taken is optimal, but what we can easily say is that their path has been more successful and more reliable than every other developer of rockets for the last 35 years at least, and SpaceX has existed for only 60% of that time, being founded 21 years ago.
MUSK IS EVIL.
SpaceX is good at developing rockets.
Two separate things.
@12. Raging Bee : “I’m all in favor of space exploration, but I’m getting damn tired of all this old-school gee-whiz technophilic hype from a company that’s trying to accomplish…what exactly? “
Well, eventually get people to Mars – among other things :
Source : https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/spacex-plans-to-triple-launch-cadence-with-144-missions-next-year/168454/
@37. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden :
Plus the Soviets lost cosmonauts on their rockets and spacecraft too. To be precise, there were 135 Space Shuttle flights from 1981 to 2011 all but two of them successful and all but two returning their crews safely to Earth again. See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Shuttle_missions
&
&
Quoting for truth and seconding here. Well writ.
Which it clearly wasn’t. WWF was founded in 1961, and it wasn’t by any means the first environmental organization. Fuck it, John Muir died in 1914 after a lifetime campaigning for the preservation of wilderness.
Incidentally, this might give some of the “Man-Has-Always” crowd pause!
KG@53 Which it clearly wasn’t. WWF was founded in 1961, and it wasn’t by any means the first environmental organization. Fuck it, John Muir died in 1914 after a lifetime campaigning for the preservation of wilderness.
I think Silent Spring (’62) is frequently credited as kicking off the “modern” environmental movement, which arguably has a different character than earlier wildlife and wilderness conservation. But even that thesis is somewhat undermined by the fact that the US had already had (weak) legislation on air and water pollution for a decade or two by that point.
It might be fair to say that “Earthrise” accelerated that so-called “modern” movement, though. It’s difficult to disentangle that effect from all the other events in that era that helped do so though: “Population Bomb” (also ’68), the ignition of the Cuyahoga river (’69), etc…
Incidentally, this might give some of the “Man-Has-Always” crowd pause!
I don’t think you understand the “Man-Has-Always” crowd.
While there was probably one particular ignition that got more press or that broke through to the national press for the first time or whatever, they Cuyahoga had MANY fires over a number of years. The way you’ve worded this you’re not wrong: the words you use don’t deny other ignitions happened. I just like to clarify that it wasn’t a one-off. Shit was BAD there. And humans weren’t even getting serious about it the first time a river caught fire.
I think quite a lot of them like to imagine themselves as the bold, manly pioneers powering through the universe. Even if, in their more rational moments, they realise it’s not going to be them personally, the feeling might not be quite the same if they have to imagine these manly pioneers as rather… droopy.
Raging Bee@12, StevoR@52 Well, eventually get people to Mars – among other things:
Indeed. Many other things. As Crip Dyke points out, Starship has one of the largest, if not the largest, payload capabilities in history. What’s more, the operational goals for Starship are:
– to be around three orders of magnitude cheaper (the stated target is something ridiculous like $20/kg to LEO — but even 20 or 30 times that would be revolutionary. Compare (very approx.) with Falcon 9 @ $2,500, Atlas V @ $10,000, Soyuz @ $15,000, Shuttle @ $20,000-$50,000.)
– to have capacity for not just a few dozen launches over the lifetime of the program (Apollo, STS), but hundreds, per-year. Maybe several per day.
If all that comes to pass, particularly the cost per kg, Starship will be a qualitative shift, not just a quantitative increment. It’s a revolution, like bronze to iron. Or sail to steam. At least oars to sail.
Like I said before, I don’t think anyone, even within the space industry, has really grasped all the implications of how that kind of launch cost change upsets things all across the board. NASA can send out orders of magnitude more probes and rovers — on the same budget. Supplying (and staffing) a Moon base becomes feasible, on existing budgets. So do more and bigger space stations — rotating ones with artificial gravity and capacious inflated habitats, say. Meanwhile, small private companies can launch custom satellites. Big companies can launch more satellites — or perhaps bigger ones, such as for zero-g manufacturing. Even fully commercial manned missions if there’s some reason to do that. Asteroid captures — which some are already talking about — will suddenly look a lot more enticing for investors. Even old ideas like orbital solar look a little better (though it’s hard to compete economically with plain old roof panels nowadays).
And then that’s not counting all the related industries — satellite manufacturing, say — which are going to have to expand dramatically to meet that demand, and further increase the economies of scale. Or the entirely new industries that will need to spring up (space tugs and sweepers to deal with the broken satellites or debris, for example).
As to Mars, I’m actually a little bearish on that for the time being — an Apollo-style visit might be possible (and it’d be a longer visit than Neil and the gang had, due to the orbital mechanics). But there are still a lot of difficult technical issues to work out to before long-term/permanent habitation is viable. (Radiation and low-g destroying body and brain. Ubiquitous poisonous dust. Reproduction. You know, little things.)
But I think Mars is probably the least important destination initially. The first step to going out there for more than a visit was always going to be Earth orbit and the Moon. IMO, the Moon in particular is a much better experimental station for working out problems like dust, health (in low but not 0-G), food production, ISRU, and, eventually, babies. Something like Starship certainly makes all that work a lot easier.
I think there’s also a pressing need for regulators to start thinking about what all this means. The last thing we want is people like Musk setting the rules out there by default.
For environmental movements… Ducks Unlimited was founded in 1937, and was basically the formal splitting off of a group dedicated to ‘sport bird management’ that had started as part of a hunting club ten years earlier. Sure their focus was on saving the environment so there would continue to be ducks to hunt for generations to come, but it was still a ‘let’s take care of the wilderness’ environmental movement that got a lot more active after the big Dust Bowl events of the mid-1930s.
There are a number of relatively quiet environmental groups that operate as basically conservation land trusts, buying up land and holding it in trust to prevent development, and those have been a thing at least since the Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations was founded in 1891. This is how you basically co-opt the concepts of ownership and corporate structure for the general good.
(I was recently looking up the history of some of this for an urban fantasy story I’m working on where a fae creature got involved in a trust like this back in the 1930s as a way to protect her grove from development through perfectly legal means. )
@jack loco
Amen. Musk setting rules (or even just norms) would be at least bad and potentially catastrophic. (How bad would probably depend on how much the professionals are able to hold him back.)
Aw, heck.
Lecou was autocorrected to “loco”. My apologies.
KG @56: I think quite a lot of them like to imagine themselves as the bold, manly pioneers powering through the universe. Even if, in their more rational moments, they realise it’s not going to be them personally, the feeling might not be quite the same if they have to imagine these manly pioneers as rather… droopy.
Maybe. I’m sure some do have an Adventure Magazine for Men kind of vision for the whole thing. But not all. And the degree that they do have that attitude is going to be inversely proportional to the degree that they’d engage with any evidence that the invincible He-Man astronaut of their fantasies suffers from ‘droopiness’.
Meanwhile, anyone who’s actually engaged with the science already understands perfectly well that human habitation in space has some serious problems to solve. It’s not just droopy johnsons. It’s failing eyesight, brittle bones, decaying muscles, swelling brains. Who knows what happening in the female reproductive system. Not to mention psychological issues related to confinement and isolation, or all the other issues that remain to be discovered.
But anyone who understands there are problems also understands that those problems will indeed need to be solved in one way or another to before long term habitation can come into its own. We’re already taking the first steps, after all, by doing studies like the one you linked, cataloging and quantifying these problems.
And while it’s possible that some of them will end up throwing up a permanent wall, it’s a little premature to make that call — we’ve barely even started. Even the article you linked talks about promising results partially counteracting the observed effect with use of antioxidants. Long term, I imagine solving these problems completely will involve developing a far greater understanding and control over the various homestasis and repair pathways in our bodies. With likely not a few benefits for people back on Earth too.
Krip Dyke @59 Amen. Musk setting rules (or even just norms) would be at least bad and potentially catastrophic. (How bad would probably depend on how much the professionals are able to hold him back.)
I don’t even want to imagine. Particularly because I for one do want humans to eventually go out into space. I’d really rather they weren’t enslaved in a Nazi ancap dystopia. Same for the rest of us back on Earth, for that matter.
Which reminds me: I meant to add that it’s not just regulators who should start thinking about this stuff. I also think it’d be great if well-meaning space skeptics — perhaps like some of the people in this very thread — moved past “haha, another rocket exploded” and started to think more about the much bigger problems we’re going to need to address when the rockets inevitably start to work.
Hey, found a powered return to pad flight from 1960.
Just… Not an intentional return to pad.
Seriously though, Apollo and Soyuz during their early phase couldn’t return to pad on a bet. The technology for the required automation just wasn’t there. We’re talking germanium transistors and later, silicon transistor based discrete component computers and CPU chips, just a dream. It wasn’t until the ’70’s that we got IC’s being common and VLSI chips, not even quite a dream yet until the ’80’s.
And frankly, the Russians were way ahead of the US in automation. By the ’80’s, tanks autoloaded (ours still don’t), submarines had so much automation that the crews were tiny in comparison to US boats and Russia had Soyuz automatically docking and undocking for half a lifetime now.
@StevoR, Vanguard was one of many US rockets that came with a transmission that defaulted to reverse gear.
The old joke was that the Russians and the US divvied up the German rocket scientists, with the Russians getting prime pick. And I know pretty much all of the rocket program jokes, my first station was at Redstone Arsenal.
Oh, a bit OT, but still within Muskrat land. Paris Hilton just pulled her company’s campaign, one just trumpeted by Xitter last month as a major gain, over the neo-nazi crap.
wzrd1@63 Seriously though, Apollo and Soyuz during their early phase couldn’t return to pad on a bet. The technology for the required automation just wasn’t there.
I’m not sure that’s self-evident. After all, the AGC made a perfectly good powered descent to the lunar surface. Using a zero-zero control law not altogether different from a Falcon 9 landing, even.
It’s true the last few seconds of the lunar approach were done with a human in the loop — but that wasn’t because of any shortcoming of the guidance computer, as such. It was more to do with the “someone needs to put eyeballs on the landing site to see if it’s covered in car-sized boulders” problem. But landing on a prepared pad (or barge) wouldn’t have that issue. Plus you could build feedback radars and so forth into the pad for better terminal position/velocity data.
And remember, you don’t necessarily need a digital computer to do every single calculation. That’s what we’d do, because IOPS and 64-bit FPUs are cheap. But you can do an awful lot with a couple of vacuum tubes and a properly tuned analog servo loop, with no micro-controllers in sight.
So I suspect the computer issues probably could have been solved, eventually. (By the time you get into the Shuttle design era, it shouldn’t even have been that difficult.) It’s all the other complications that would have pushed the program to the breaking point. They’d need a different engine, for one. The F-1 didn’t have a throttle, let alone relight capability. And the center engine would have needed a gimbal. Plus you’d need to add control fins, and possibly rethink the aerodynamics of the whole first stage in general. And…
Then when all the new parts were fitted, they’d have had to test it. Which I suspect would have taken a lot more than 15 tries…
Hmm – the old “spinoffs” argument. Or you could put the effort into solving those problems for people on earth directly – possibly with a few benefits for people off earth! Seriously, the question is what the benefits are of having people (rather than machines) sited permanently or semi-permanently anywhere off earth. I think it likely there will continue to be people sent into orbit, at least for the next few decades, and to a research base on the moon, with similar durations of stay as now in Antarctica – that’s assuming we’re not headed for some near-term disaster such as looks quite possible at present. But as robots become more capable, I’m struggling to see any point in keeping that up, let alone sending people to Mars or further. Robots can be designed for the conditions. People can’t.
What proportion of the cost of all these things is launching stuff to orbit? The answer will of course be different for different activities, but has anyone done the calculations (and made them public), to your knowledge?
I know this was for Jack, who might have a better answer, but our past major science missions have generally been sent on government rockets, and those programs are notoriously difficult to cost out. Programs start and stop and get renamed, etc. The testing for one potential rocket is probably very useful after its cancellation during the design phase of the next potential rocket. But is that R&D factored into the cost of that next rocket (or the one after that, if the next gen is also canceled and you need a third)?
Putting something on a Boeing/ULA rocket has a notional cost. There’s an amount that’s paid to the company for that particular launch and the parties all agree that that’s the price if an accountant comes asking questions. But how do you amortize all the research and development leading up to that point? And since no rocket EVER until the Falcon-9 made a profit, then no rocket ever even began to pay off that back R&D debt.
Maybe the reasonable thing is to ignore it. It has, after all, largely been spent — unless you’re talking about new launch systems like Ariane-6 or New Glenn, but nothing has been launched on those yet, so there’s no current project that you could cost out on them.
It’s hard to say, though the cost to orbit using the fictional accounting that ignores R&D as paid for entirely by the government is about $10k/kg to LEO, and about $30k/kg to run off to Mars or Venus or further afield.
That means 100kg missions cost $3m in launch costs if they’re going farther than the moon. So I guess what we need is to cost out how much we spend on probes and rovers, on average, per kilogram, before they’re put on top of a rocket.
I strongly suspect that we spend more than $3M per 100kg of probe/rover, so I would expect savings of 10% to 40% just from launch costs falling precipitously (as suggested above, though I don’t think they can ever fall quite as far as Musk has said is his target).
But here’s the thing. If launch costs are that cheap, then you can build and send more, and it doesn’t matter nearly as much if one fails, which means that design and development become cheaper. You are not, after all, needing to wait 15-20 years to send another probe to the same target as we currently do with everything other than Mars. This means that we’re not needing to design from scratch — technology after 2 years of improvement is not necessarily incompatible with the original design the way tech after 15 years will be.
I mean, as long as launch costs stayed high, it didn’t make any sense to try to get costs as low as $1M per probe. It was still going to be a big ticket item no matter how cheap the thing you send, so why not send something great that costs a lot?
The logic changes with lowered launch costs, which suggests to me that you’re going to have dramatically more missions + a higher failure rate, but a rate still low enough that you’re getting more probes out to your various locations.
That’s a guess about budgetary psychology rather than a cost estimate, but I think it’s useful to ponder.
Thanks Crip Dyke@68,
Myself, I suspect that for scientific probes, and anything that involves sending people into space, the launch costs are a pretty small proportion of the total. If you’re sending people, the idea is generally to bring them back in one piece – although thinking as I write, I guess that for resupply, launch costs would be a considerable part of the total. If you’re sending scientific probes, they contain sophisticated instruments and in some case, highly innovative things like helicopters to fly on Mars or Titan, or potentially, drills to penetrate the icy layers of Europa or Enceladus; and if it’s anywhere further than Mars, and particularly if they are to orbit or land, they take years to get to their destination. As for asteroid mining, so far I remain sceptical about its economic viability, unless you’re going to use the stuff you produce in space, and in that case lower launch costs make doing so less attractive. I’d expect much lower launch costs to make most difference to applications that are relatively low-cost and routine otherwise, like communications or surveillance satellites, or (horrible thought) orbiting advertising and propaganda.
Is there some competition somewhere for quotes that are not going to age well in hundreds of years? Because this is a sure winner. X-D
@ ^ Robots can be designed to look after and enable people to do things too.. Conditions can sometimes be changed.
Technoloy combined with imagination and vision can be well, miracle working when you think of what peopelhave one despite nay-sayers nay-sayng that it couldn’t be done.. Clarke’s First Law :
Source : https://www.newscientist.com/definition/clarkes-three-laws/
Admittedly excessively ageist but still..
People have done.
Silentbob@70,
And that’s why I didn’t add “and never will be”. On a timescale of centuries, and excluding the highly probable collapse of our technoculture, it might well be impossible to distinguish between people and robots.
Yes, but why bother? Why make everything more difficult and expensive? I don’t think there’s a rational answer to that, it’s just that the “Man-has-always” crowd want humans rather than just machines on Mars.
@ ^ KG : Why? Because people choose to do so and make it so. Because we learn from it and benefit form it and enjoy it. Because why not?
There is no doubt that people enjoy fantasizing.
@ ^ Rob Grigjanis : Yes and then some people work to make those fantasies come true for example having SF ideas about newer better rockets and spacecraft as a fantasy and then actually going and working to design, build and make them fly.
Also like making the dream and fantasy of human flight actually happen before that among so many other examples.
Say what you like about Musk and how evil he is – and I agree he is an evil bigot – but his SpaceX team have built and flown some marvellous flying machines and iincredibly effective and impressive rockets indeed and keep doing so. Whether they need Musk to do that is a whole other question and I think (& hope) the answer is no. Get rid of him and keep SpaceX I say!
StevoR:
… having SF ideas about newer better rockets and spacecraft as a fantasy and then actually going and working to design, build and make them fly.
I know what it is you are trying to express, but be aware that SF stands for more than one thing, but rather [‘science fiction’, ‘speculative fiction’, ‘science fantasy’, […]].
Basically, it they work, they are not fantasy, and if they are fantasy, they don’t work.
In short, it took an evil bigot to conceptualise, fund, and run something like SpaceX.
Anyway. I very much doubt you have given much thought to what is evil versus what is merely pernicious, never mind to what is incidental.
I have. And, by my reckoning, he ain’t evil.
StevoR@74,
Your response perfectly illustrates my point @73. That you don’t realise this is amusing.
@ ^ KG : Well, whether you are amused or not you haven’t answered my why not?
@ 77. John Morales : Yeah, SF was intended to be read as Science Fiction there which admittedly comes in a lot of varieties and, yes, speculatiove fiction is a thing too.
Well, the swords part of the Swords and Sorcery (sub?)genre work.. ;-)
The sorcery bits not so much..
Musk did those things ok but was he necessary for that? I don’t think so. Someone other than Musk who wasn’t an evil bigot could have done that too even if historically that didn’t happen in the specific case of SpaceX.
Could Musk have done all that very well without being an evil bigot? I think so. Musk wasn’t always as fascist as he has become now. His politics has turned far more extreme reichwing and racist than it used to be – he once supported Yang’s proposed universal basic income & voted for both HRC and Biden. Musk has become more radicalised with time – see :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Politics
So when Musk wasn’t an evil bigot he ran and created SpaceX and he could still choose not to be an evil bigot and run SpaceX and do so better by looking after safety, its workers, etc..
Nazism is almost the epitome of evil and Musk is if not literally a nazi (yet?) someone who is supporting and empowering them which is to say supporting and empowering and siding with evil.
Also what # 37 Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden wrote earlier :
Plus what #27. Robert Westbrook wrote about Musk and his actions here :
& later in same comment :
Then there’s the outright treason of what he did to Ukraine with shutting off Starlink access at just the wrong moment as discussed here – 15 min clip If You’re Listening clip here which should itself be proof of evil with him siding with Putin’s evil genocidal invasion. So yeah, I have no doubt or hesitation in saying Musk is evil.
This does NOT mean that SpaceX is evil tho’ or, again, that SpaceX is responsible for Musk’s evil or helps it. Again, I don’t think SpaceX is making that much money for Musk & I do think he should be removed from it.
PS. Short version & to mangle a metaphor here :
Don’t throw the good SpaceX bathwater out with the Musk evil man-baby!
Because the sorcery bits are the science fantasy, and therefore do not work.
It’s a conceptual thingy: if something works, it’s not fantastical, it’s real.
<
blockquote>Musk did those things ok but was he necessary for that?
<
blockquote>
Don’t know, don’t care.
Clearly, he was sufficient. And he was first. This is all historical fact.
Perhaps his huge ego is what caused what you so admire, that is, the company and the talent it employs.
Wow.
This is just like the mirror version of QAnon, even though ostensibly it’s hyperbole.
And so we circle to the very fucking point you — predictably — do not get.
Even slightly.
Again: no Elon, no SpaceX.
So. Maybe he was not necessary, in some alternate timeline.
Point being, when a claim such as “NO ONE with such a childish, cowardly, irresponsible and uncaring mindset should EVER be in charge of ANY business involving rockets.”, given that he envisioned it, he advocated for it, he got it going, and he ran it since he caused its inception, that claim clearly has no merit.
@ 75 Rob Grigjanis
Heh.
Dude, it’s literally why you have access to hot and cold running water, medicine, electricity, Internet, smartphones, etc. Don’t knock it. X-D
(I mean you were a physicist, right. You’re aware Einstein fantasized riding on a light beam as a first step to relativity?)
@ 81 Morales
Your argument is seriously – if an evil person was involved in an innovation, evil is necessary/beyond criticism. (While conceding the evil was not necessarily a contributing factor).
You’re brain works in bizarre ways man.
While I’m at it, Morales claim Musk “funded” SpaceX is misleading at best. It was funded by the US government:
Commercial Orbital Transportation Services – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Orbital_Transportation_Services
bob:
Wow you’re a thickie.
No.
My argument is SpaceX was envisaged by Musk. Fact.
It was founded by Musk. Fact.
It has been controlled by Musk for the last 20+ years. Fact.
It is what it is with Musk at the helm. It would not be what it is otherwise.
Therefore, it is quite silly to claim that Musk is somehow not a proper person to run it.
(Get with it!)
Wow. You are most seriously challenged at comprehending basic claims.
What exactly makes him evil, in your estimation?
(Too successful? Too visionary? Too rich? Too smug? Do tell)
You are truly an ignoramus. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#History):
Well, at least it works. Envy me!
Yes, I did, @73:
Assuming there are not infinite resources to devote to off-earth activities, we’ll be able to do far more exploration, science, and developing resources and infrastructure for further activities (and maybe to directly benefit people on earth) just using machines, than if a large part of those resources are devoted to keeping people alive in extremely hostile environments. The scientific and technological advances from off-earth activities have been almost entirely due to programmes not involving sending people off-earth: earth observation, communication satellites, GPS, planetary probes, space telescopes… About the only exception is knowledge about how weightlessness affects the human body – something which has no application outside the space programme itself. I’d concede there will likely be some scientific value in having human geologists on the moon, but the same resources would be far better spent on refining the design and use of robots and telepresence to do the work.
Further to #86, I should acknowledge maintenance and repairs to the Hubble space telescope carried out by astronauts – though as far as the maintenance is concerned, I wonder if plans for astronauts to do that weren’t included in order to justify there being astronauts! Certainly there appear to be no plans for astronauts to maintain the JWST.
Silentbob @82: I don’t knock fantasizing; it’s a very important part of my life. What I do knock is boring other people with one’s fantasies (even the non-naughty ones!). A fantasy is something with no discernible path twixt here and there (e.g. FTL). That distinguishes it from a thought experiment, which is anchored in reality, and requires work.
Part of the problem is people taking banal twaddle like Clarke’s ‘laws’ seriously.
KG@67 What proportion of the cost of all these things is launching stuff to orbit? The answer will of course be different for different activities, but has anyone done the calculations (and made them public), to your knowledge?
A: It obviously varies quite a bit, and not to my knowledge.
That’s one of the reasons I said I don’t think anyone really knows how its going to play out.
But to ponder it a bit, take a mission like Mars Perseverance. On the surface, it would appear to be little affected by launch costs. The budget breakdown there is over $2B for the Perseverance hardware, $200M for ongoing operations expenses (i.e., actually collecting the data), and only about $240M for the launch.
From that perspective, even if launches were free, it would cut less than 10% out of the budget.
But it’s more complicated than that. Remember the bulk of that $2B hardware cost isn’t actually manufacturing the physical items, it’s R&D to figure out what to make. Usually, you’re designing an entirely bespoke orbiter, re-entry system, rover vehicle, and experiments. And you have to design them to be robust enough to survive the rigors of launch and space travel, but still small and light enough to fit on the rocket. It’s a tough set of constraints, so it’s takes a lot of work.
But If the launch was $2 million instead of $250 million — and the penalty for a little extra mass were linear — it would upend those constraints.
For one thing, maybe you could use the leftover $248 million to go ahead and make 2 or 3 or 10 rovers, so you could land some spares. And then, if that’s the plan all along, means maybe you don’t need to over-engineer each one quite as much in the first place, and you could cut back on a few rounds of R&D and redundant parts. With a looser weight budget (to the point of negligible, at least comparatively), maybe you could develop a standardized rover platform — one that’s bulkier and heavier, but more flexible. Then the next mission won’t need a bespoke platform, it’ll just need to design a few new instruments or experiments to bolt on — which can be correspondingly more clever, since they’ll have more R&D attention.
And then… what happens if/when those lower launch costs accelerate unrelated commercial activities in near Earth space? That would, among other things, create new markets for “space-rated” parts like sensors, actuators, solar panels, computer modules, thrusters, etc. Soon, you could get decent stuff a lot closer to “off the shelf” than you can now. Ditto for the engineering expertise to integrate them into spacecraft designs. At some point, maybe you don’t even need NASA and JPL to send up a Mars rover, maybe the local State University could do one, much as they occasionally do small cubesats now. (Another thing cheap shared launch on Falcon 9 has done a lot to enable.)
Round and round it goes. Bottom line is you just can’t really look at existing missions to predict how it would all work out, because the limitations of payload size and weight are such a primary constraint. To figure out what Starship means, you need to throw out all the preconceptions of the last 50 years of planetary science program design and start from scratch.
KG @66 Seriously, the question is what the benefits are of having people (rather than machines) sited permanently or semi-permanently anywhere off earth.
Well, this isn’t the full answer, but to continue the scenario above, at some point, you have to start to ask why you sending rovers with just 5 or 6 fixed experiment modules or whatever, in the first place?
Someone once said that a single astronaut with a camera, a pick, a microscope, and a couple of test tubes could do ALL the science all the rovers on Mars have done so far, in a couple of afternoons. That’s probably slightly hyperbolic, but there’s a core of truth to it. Robots have to be designed for specific tasks. And the payload and R&D budget means you have to make hard choices — there are always more good ideas for experiments than you can fit on the rover.
What’s more, the experiments that do make the cut can only do exactly what they can do and no more. Find a weird rock you didn’t expect? Get a strange reading from a sensor? Be prepared to lobby for another $2B and wait 10 more years before you can design and land another bespoke rover carrying a module to do the follow up.
But if you’ve got a lady up there in a spacesuit, she can probably just hit it with a hammer or something and see what happens.
The problem is getting the lady there. If your budget is $2B you can’t send humans right now. Even assuming we had off-the-shelf solutions for radiation and zero-G and all the other “they’d probably die early from exposure to the harsh reality of a lifeless universe” issues, I think even the most conservative manned-mission scenarios would involve launching a total payload of several hundred tons: food, life support modules, return vehicles and so forth. Which, at Perseverance prices, would be tens or hundreds of $billions in launch costs. With a “B”.
Which puts us in a quandary not dissimilar to Sam Vimes and his boots: We could theoretically focus on sending a well-equipped manned mission that could do almost infinitely more science, but we can’t afford the huge upfront cost. So we have to continue to send an endless series of limited robotic missions which are cheap-er (though not exactly cheap).
Something like Starship doesn’t entirely invert that conundrum, but it does change the calculus. At the optimistic end of the hypothetical Starship launch costs, a mission with a kiloton of payload is in the tens of $millions. With an “M”. (!!!)
You still have to invest in solving those “die early from the harsh realities of a lifeless universe” issues that a manned mission faces, but those launch prices suddenly make it look a lot more interesting. It also makes those issues easier to solve. Right now, we dribble out life sciences research in space. We send up a little experiment module with a couple of sunflower seeds or something, and then budget 5 minutes each for one of the half dozen incredibly busy astronauts on the space station to take some readings. But with Starship, you can start to send up grad students and boxes of lab rats to run experiments directly, on a sprawling moon base…
And once you’ve solved those issues, whatever the cost, it only needs to be paid once. No more bespoke robots. Humans can go almost anywhere, in more-or-less standardized spacecraft and modules, for prices eventually approaching the payload cost. (They’d still have drones and specialized equipment, of course, but those designs are dramatically simplified once you remove requirements like self-deployment and running unattended for decades.)
LG @66But as robots become more capable, I’m struggling to see any point in keeping that up, let alone sending people to Mars or further.
Well, ChatGPT notwithstanding, it’s going to be a while before we’re going to be able to send anything to Mars with even a fraction of the on-the-ground mission flexibility of a human. We can speculate about such robots, but we can speculate about anti-radiation drugs and artificial wombs too.
Still, I suppose it is probably true that robots will eventually be able to do everything that humans can do, and better.Then the question will need to be asked: why have humans living on Mars when robots can do everything better?
But a lot of other questions will need to be asked, too. Why have humans write novels when robots can do it better? Why have humans hand-build furniture, when machines can do it better? Etc. Why have humans living on Earth when robots can do everything better.
If you can figure out how to answer those last questions, you’ll have my answer to the first one too.
KG @73: Yes, but why bother? Why make everything more difficult and expensive? I don’t think there’s a rational answer to that, it’s just that the “Man-has-always” crowd want humans rather than just machines on Mars.
It’s funny, because I had to read the bolded part twice to realize you were saying manned stuff is more difficult and more expensive.
This just isn’t true. If it were, we’d use robots for everything. There’d be no people on Antarctica, for example, just robots. We’d use them for difficult, hazardous jobs like offshore drilling, underwater welding, or crab fishing in the Bering Sea. Etc., Etc.
We don’t do any of that because in fact it is NOT easier and less expensive to use robots. It is exactly the reverse.
Even in the rare circumstances where we do use robots, they’re by far the more difficult and expensive option. For example, you don’t send in a bomb disposal robot because it’s easier to defuse a bomb using an RC controller and a grainy video camera. Nor by some measures is that robot any cheaper than a guy with a pair of wire cutters. That’s true of even the most sophisticated Boston Dynamics robot dogs or whatever. Even industrial robots — like for welding cars — aren’t used because they’re cheap or particularly easy to operate. They’re used because they have better economies of scale: once you have managed to program and debug a particular operation (which is hard), they can repeat that programming very accurately for tens of thousands of cycles.
None of those rules magically change “because outer space”. Robots on Mars are just as awkward and limited as those bomb disposal robots. Usually even more so, because it’s not an instant remote-control telepresence link — there’s unavoidably several seconds to minutes of round trip delay. Even the tiniest move has to be orchestrated and programmed in exacting detail. It’s all the difficulty of programming a welding robot, without any of the economies of scale. And for everything but the most routine operations, there’s a few nail biting ‘will it work’ minutes afterward, with no emergency stop button that can possibly be pressed fast enough. (If it doesn’t work, you’ve bricked a $2 billion rover, and it’s another 10 years to wait for another one.)
The bottom line is that robotic space exploration, at least of planetary surfaces, is not cheaper or easier in any way. In fact, on the basis of “dollars per unit of science”, it’s probably tens or hundreds of times less efficient than manned exploration would be.
What it (currently) has going for it, over manned exploration, is simply that it can be done in smaller pieces. It is possible to bite off small chunks of exploration that are merely a couple thousand KGs in launch size — and a couple of billion in price. The cardboard-soled boots of planetary science.
Sure, it might take 1000 robot missions that size to do the science that one manned mission could do, but the manned mission has more fixed cost overhead. It would weigh and cost at least a hundred times as much just to get off the ground. Which makes it simply too big a bite to take all at once. And we’re stuck with an endless series of tiny nibbles.
(NOTE: Another sensible reason to use robots is planetary protection. It’s a lot easier to sterilize a robot than an astronaut, so there are sound reasons to use robots until it can be confirmed that there’s no extant life to contaminate. Which might indeed be a while for some place like Mars or Europa. It’s safer for that theoretical life, and makes it easier to study in isolation if it is there. Not necessarily cheaper for us though.)
Jack @90:
Um, you are utterly, totally, epically missing the point.
For Antarctica, people are far cheaper, because it’s so very comparatively less difficult for people.
Gravity. Radiation shielding. Air. Opportunity to evacuate. Opportunity for resupply. Real-time communication. That sort of thing.
That’s why there are no people — zero — beyond the immediate vicinity of planet Earth, whereas there’s quite a presence in Antarctica.
(Also, rubbish heaps there. Middens for future archaeologists?)
Aww, sorry KG, don’t mean to poach, but…
The bottom line is that robotic space exploration, at least of planetary surfaces, is not cheaper or easier in any way.
And therefore, every single instance of space exploration, at least of planetary surfaces, has been done by robots.
(Hey, remember the ill-fated Titanic?)
[memo to self; bockquotes are not as good as blockquotes]
KG @69: As for asteroid mining, so far I remain sceptical about its economic viability, unless you’re going to use the stuff you produce in space, and in that case lower launch costs make doing so less attractive.
I’d be curious how you figure that.
Sure, the ridiculous “OMG one asteroid would make everyone a trillionaire” thing is wrong. Once you bring an asteroid full of platinum into orbit, platinum prices obviously aren’t going to be what they once were.
But, after the prices crash, it will remain a fact that things like platinum group and rare earth metals are damned useful. And I daresay even more uses could be found for, say, irridium, if it were available for somewhat less than $4500/oz. Ditto things like indium or tellurium. (And as a bonus, you could probably be pretty sure none of it was getting mined by enslaved child laborers.)
The automated mission to bring an asteroid into orbit in the first place isn’t necessarily that expensive, especially given commodity hardware and launch services. Once it’s there, the costs of extracting it and shipping it back to Earth are unknowns, true, but the “owners” of the asteroid are under no obligation to sell the material for less than the their operating costs. Assuming something can be extracted for less than terrestrial operations can manage, and assuming the investors don’t go bankrupt on the capture, then it can probably be made to work out. Almost definitonally, in fact.
I also think we’re a really long way from the point where launch services and things like orbital mining or manufacturing are competitors. True, eventually there might be a point where space settlements and industries are all self sustaining. But if that were already the case, we wouldn’t be having half the discussions we are here.
Meanwhile, industry in space is going to need a lot of stuff from Earth.
Like, “space mining” probably won’t start so much as “mining” as it will “bust off a chunk of rock, wrap it in a heat blanket or something, and drop it in the ocean”. All the stuff to do the breaking, the wrapping and the de-orbiting will need to be brought up from Earth. (And/or they will need to rely on services like orbital tugs that are enabled by a thriving launch industry.)
Later, maybe something more like proper mining and on-orbit refining can be worked out. But that will take launches with even more material and equipment. Not to mention workers, and their living quarters and supplies, etc. Eventually, I’m sure ways will be found to produce one after another critical commodity or piece of equipment in space, or on more energetically favorable locations like the Moon. But for quite some time, that will just mean more room on the cargo rockets for even greater matching quantities of the remaining critical items, or, after that, luxuries, and tourists, and…
It also amuses me how grandiose the term ‘astronaut’ is… ‘star sailor’, it literally means.
(Not exactly Centauri, is the Moon’s orbit)
‘Ape in a can’, is what I think it means.
Ah yes, robots are notorious for needing their living quarters.
… a post-scarcity economy! The Culture!
<snicker>
It also amuses me how grandiose the term ‘astronaut’ is…
If more people start doing more things more routinely in space, that term will surely be replaced by more “down to earth” terms, such as “mission commander,” “shuttle pilot,” “arcology engineer,” “miner,” “ore-lift operator,” “satellite maintenance technician,” “crew physician,” “warship gunner,” etc.
PS: Thanks to jack lecou for some very interesting points about machine vs. human labor off-Earth. Unmanned space probes have certainly served us well when they have to spend many years flying toward an object for purposes of taking pictures and other readings and maybe performing a set of tests on material samples. But anything that involves ongoing engagement with a terrain and planetary environment could well require the much greater flexibility on-site humans can bring.
Raging Bee, not bad.
A properly conceived and cogently explained hypothetical outcome.
Ah yes. Simpler still, crew member. Staffer.
(Or, as someone very recently characterised Elon’s employees, “peons”)
Mind you, I reckon perhaps you’re indulged in a tad too much milsf when you include “warship gunner,” as a routine term for a solarnaut. After all, the Sun is a star.
No, seriously. Why send the admin staff or the managerial staff into their starvessels? That’s what the workers are for.
John Morales @91 That’s why there are no people — zero — beyond the immediate vicinity of planet Earth, whereas there’s quite a presence in Antarctica.
Precisely.
As you say: the difference is that the hazards of manned exploration in Antarctica are surmountable. People wear coats, live in heated living modules, and can rely on regular cargo flights for food and fuel and crew rotations and so forth. Maintaining a manned presence in Antarctica that way isn’t cheap or without risk — it’s a lot more expensive and dangerous than maintaining a manned presence in, say, Rhode Island, but it is tractable.
And because it is tractable to do a proper manned mission, it would be insane to try to do the whole thing with a series of tiny bespoke telepresence robots. Because however expensive it is to operate the manned base, it would be at least 1000 times slower and more expensive to do all the same things robotically. And that’s despite the fact that robots are smaller, don’t require snacks, and don’t complain about the cold.
There’s not anything magical about space exploration that fundamentally changes that calculus. Robots are simply the only way we can explore most of the solar system today, because unlike the hazards of Antarctica, the logistics and hazards of manned exploration — vast distances, radiation, lack of gravity — are not (yet) surmountable. Until those obstacles are surmounted, we are stuck with the astronomically expensive, molasses slow, second-best alternative: all-robotic exploration.
And my point is that the instant enough of those obstacles do become surmountable — bigger rockets, rotating living modules, pills to (even partially) counteract radiation damage — robotic exploration will lose the struggle decisively. Just as it does in Antarctica.
John Morales @92 And therefore, every single instance of space exploration, at least of planetary surfaces, has been done by robots.
Indeed. Not counting the Moon, of course. Which is a planetary surface.
You seem to be uncomfortable with the point I’m making, but it’s hardly a novel principle. Millions of poor people deal with this kind of thing every day — e.g., pay day loan and check cashing outfits are in no way cheaper than banks, and yet that’s the only thing they can afford. Like I said — Sam Vimes’ boots. Currently, “proper boots” are, in one way or another, simply beyond our means. That doesn’t mean the cardboard boots we’re stuck with are actually a better deal.
Maybe a slightly more palatable way to make this point would be to turn your observation around and ask something like “if diesel container ships are so much cheaper, why did all cargo used to be sent around in wooden sailing ships?,” or, “If fiber optic cables can carry so much more information, why did people use morse code?”
That captures the fact that there is indeed technical gap in play — as I said above, sending a manned mission to somewhere like the surface of Mars is arguably simply impossible with current technology, not simply a matter of being a couple hundred billion dollars too rich for any space agency’s annual budget. (The truth is probably somewhere in between: with the possible exception of a magical radiation pill, I don’t think we’re necessarily talking about any technological leaps as large as sailboats to diesel turbines. But it hardly matters. The quanta of budgets are just as insurmountable.)
If humans start living, working and extracting wealth from off-Earth locations, sooner or later there will be war in space. Whether such wars will entail “warships” carrying artillery or railguns operated by “gunners,” is, I admit, considerably less likely, for many reasons. But wars there will be, and the people doing the actual killing and bombing will have titles and roles much more specific than “astronaut.”
jack, “Precisely.”
We concur. And that’s the nub of it.
Gotta distinguish speculation from expectation, and can’t build a foundation on it, either.
Come now. It could be art, it could just be a grand gesture.
We monkeys do things for monkey reasons.
I mean, how could you call this insane?
And have.
You know, monkeys in a can can look at their instruments all they want and make all the decisions they want and press all the buttons they want, but at the end of the day, it’s all about delta-v and mass and response-loop time.
When did moons become planets?
Regarding your attempted parable invoking Sam’s Boots, may I ask what they represent in the space program?
Good grief!
Obviously, because they had container ships either way, and because they communicated either way.
Again: no people beyond the Earth-Moon system.
—
It’s like you did not get my allusion: calling people who go around the vicinity of planet Earth (but nowhere near other planets (excluding the Moon, a famously historical planet)) astronauts is like calling people who paddle in the shallows of the bay intercontinental navigagors.
Tell ya what, you’d have liked Elon’s presentation for a push to Mars, I reckon based on what you’ve written.
Right now, if a sailboat is what it takes to send people to Mars and back (remember, machines don’t need to come back), we don’t actually have a sailboat.
Perhaps once we do have a sailboat, we can start comparing that to a diesel turbine[-boat].
—
In short, nothing wrong with wishful speculative fantasy, but it’s not really a sound basis for policy.
RB,
If humans start living, working and extracting wealth from under-sea locations, sooner or later there will be war under the sea.
Yep, that’s quite possible too.
Come now. It could be art, it could just be a grand gesture.
Very droll, but I don’t think you’re actually engaging with the point. The question remains: if robotic exploration is so cheap and easy and effective, why don’t we use it in Antarctica? Even for art or grand gesture? Does the mere fact that humans can go to a place render robots uncompetitive in the exploring game?
I mean, how could you call this insane?
I’m not sure what your point is. Dumb cross-marketing stunt aside, SpaceX did have to send something up as a test payload, even if it had been a big tank of ice water or something. There was a point to be made to potential customers about what kind of delta-v Falcon Heavy had at its disposal.
When did moons become planets?
The Moon isn’t a “major planet” and doesn’t fit the IAU’s arbitrary definition — foremost of which is “orbits the sun” — but it is nevertheless a planetary object and thus has a planetary surface, one which has been visited by human beings. Many other interesting bodies we might eventually visit — Ganymede, Europa, Ceres — don’t fit parts of the definition either, but are no less hostile or interesting for all that.
Regarding your attempted parable invoking Sam’s Boots, may I ask what they represent in the space program?
Robots are the cardboard soles. Manned missions are the leather ones. Cardboard shoes are all we can afford right now — possibly even the only thing we can find on sale at the shops. That’s not the same as being cheaper.
Obviously, because they had container ships either way, and because they communicated either way.
Again: no people beyond the Earth-Moon system.
???
No idea what that is supposed to mean. And you keep repeating that bit of trivia about where humans have gone (so far) like it’s not just reinforcing my point. No one had ever made a telephone call at one point either. Until they did. That didn’t mean Morse code telegraphy was invariably “cheaper and less difficult”. It just means nobody had managed to make a telephone yet — until they did. “Doesn’t exist” simply isn’t the same as “more expensive”, or more anything else. In fact, many things are suddenly the better option the instant they’re actually a thing.
Right now, if a sailboat is what it takes to send people to Mars and back (remember, machines don’t need to come back), we don’t actually have a sailboat.
But we know roughly what one would look like. And it’s not hard to extrapolate how much more effective it would be, if those plans were completed, and the thing could be launched at a reasonable price.
The problem is some people are standing here trying to argue that there’s no point in doing any more work on the “sail boat”, because we have paper boats, and they’re “only” a hundredth of the price.
The metaphors are getting pretty twisty, but remember that what I’m originally responding to here is KG @66 “But as robots become more capable, I’m struggling to see any point in keeping that [near Earth manned space travel] up, let alone sending people to Mars or further.” and @73 “Yes, but why bother? Why make everything more difficult and expensive?”
I hope it’s clear that “it would actually be easier and cheaper” isn’t my only answer to those questions, but it is nevertheless an answer, and a true one.
(What I’m really arguing with here is the broader popular misconception that the robot landers we’ve sent to — well, Mars mainly — have been “just as good” as sending people. This is just false.
Don’t get me wrong — the Mars lander program is absolutely amazing. And certainly its thanks to it that we know a lot more about Mars than we did even when I was a kid. But it’s absolutely a drop in the ocean compared to what there is still to learn, and the accomplishments of the program are impressive at least in part because of just how gobsmacking difficult it is to do science that way.
Just to put it in perspective, think about some comparable field of science back here on Earth. Geology say. Think about how many tens of thousands of geologists, amateur and professional, have been crawling up and down and over the Earth with complete abandon for the last, oh, two hundred years. Collecting rocks, sketching sections in old mine shafts, doing tests in labs, squinting at seismographs. Etc. Even tasting soil, like one geologist I knew a long time ago.
And after all that, we still don’t know everything there is to know about geological processes and history here on Earth. How much further behind would we be if every one of those geologists had had to do all their field work by way of time sharing an occasional robotic probe through a data connection that’s no better than an old cable modem?
Pretty goddamn far behind, is the answer.
You get the picture, I hope. Obviously it’s not a perfect analogy — for example, planetary processes are much the same across the solar system, so all that work on Earth’s geology gives us a head start on Mars in some ways, and we don’t necessarily need to poke in every cranny to get the big picture. But there’s much that’s not the same too, and in many ways those are the most interesting bits. We’ve barely scratched the surface of that — pun intended.)
The answer remains: it’s neither cheap nor easy nor effective, on Earth.
But space (certainly beyond the Earth-Moon system) is not Earth.
Something something war in Ukraine drones.
Evidently.
Sure. Interplanetary craft (calling occupants).
Let’s not get into epistemology here.
When we land people on Mars or suchlike, or even send people out to a Lagrange point, then maybe a dinghy. So far, a crude raft. Like on that Castaway movie with the famous actor.
—
Last part, sure, very nice to do the exploration and the sciencing and whatnot.
Point is, do you want to get stuff done properly and affordably and efficiently, or do you want to spend all the overhead to send people out and to return them back safely?
(I note not one of you space cadets ever addresses the issue of telepresence)
interlude:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ship_Who_Sang
jack lecou@89,
I’m old enough to remember when there were men on the moon. At which point, a computer with way less power than my phone occupied a fair-sized room, and the nearest thing to a robot was a wind-up toy which could lurch a few steps on a flat surface. Which technology has been advancing faster?
I notice you don’t actually give your answer. I guess that’s because it would too obviously just be the old “Man-has-always” guff. It doesn’t take an investment of trillions of dollars (and the corresponding labour, materials and expertise) for it to be possible for people to write novels or build furniture, provided conditions on earth continue to be hospitable to human life. The bulk of those resources would be better applied in ensuring that people can continue to live (and live better) on the one planet that provides air we can breathe, water we can drink, shielding from radiation, etc. – with a comparatively tiny amount used to continue the scientific study of the universe beyond it.
@94:
Yes, if you assume the basis of your case, you can certainly state that it “can probably be made to work out”. And you might be right. But no-one has yet come anywhere close to producing a convincing prospectus.
Or of course on a city – accidentally, on purpose, or accidentally-on-purpose.
By far the most likely story of the 21st century is the collapse of our technoculture*. If that doesn’t happen, and we achieve some kind of sustainable socio-techno-ecosystem, then I think it’s quite possible it will expand beyond Earth to a far greater extent than now. But if it does, it won’t be anything close to unmodified humans that are roaming the solar system.
@101
This is obviously based on the completely unargued belief that neither robots nor (with reference to the moon) telepresence will make serious advances on a timescale of the next few decades. A glance at the news from Ukraine, and of the recent American restrictions on exporting advanced chips to China, will tell you that the world’s military-industrial complexes are going to be putting a lot of resources into these areas. They may at the same time look to establish bases on the moon, but these will be about prestige, and involve handfuls of people spending any time there at most. Lowered launch costs will be exploited almost entirely for military, commercial and scientific purposes in earth orbit.
*I hesitate to use the word “civilization”, given its connotations of civility.
@81. John Morales :
Perhaps. yeah, nothing wrong with that.
Huh? How so? How is this anything remotley like the QuAnon cult? It’s clear that Musk has been promoting nazi material
and platfoming (neo-)nazis and using X tospread hatred and racist lies.
See :
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-actual-truth-antisemitic-post-backlash-advertisers/ plus :
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/elon-musk-desantis-x-twitter-florida-political-violence-white-supremacists-neo-nazis/
among other things revealing his transphobic and racist bigotres :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/?s=Musk
If that isn’t siding and standing with nazis then what is? You can’t possibly defend what Musk has done there surely!
As I noted in #79 Musk has sorta lost the plot and bcome more radicalised and wasn’t at least such a nazi at the time he created and built SpaceX. His nazism now condemns him and Ithink is grounds for his removal.
@ StevoR
I know you probably know this, and I’m probably repeating myself, but for what it’s worth, the person you’re responding to literally couldn’t care less what’s right or wrong, true or false, he cares only about saying whatever it takes to pick a fight. Anything it takes to provoke you into responding, he will say it. He doesn’t actually believe a word of it. Getting a response is what he lives for. He’s a troll.
If you’re still happy to engage, have fun! Just know what you’re dealing with. ;-)
Easily the most dishonest poster in the history of Pharyngula. (There are worse trolls but they are more open about it.)
Whyever would I try to defend him? Just pointing out the reality.
If you think that’s defending him, I can’t help that.
But fine, you think it is his alleged political views which make him unfit to run his own company. That’s a bit different to claiming he’s not very good at running it.
Ah, the spiteful badmouthing yet again. Apparently, I am no longer hyperliteral or autistic, I’m back to picking fights. Supposedly.
What a coward.
@ 112. John Morales :
Not alleged – demonstrate dand wellknown – and actually financiallydamaging tohis companies – atleats twitter as shown by the link in my #110.
How has
TwitterX been doing lately? Not quite as important a question of what it has been doing which i , well, see the second link in my #110.See also what was noted in my #79 – & not just by me but also by (originally #37 here) Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden and by (orig # #27). Robert Westbrook. There’s a pretty clear consensus and sadly far too much evidnece of Musk doing and supporting evil and having at the very least nazi-adjacent racist and anti-Semitic views. Helping white supremacists, helping Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, exacerbating hatred and lies displayinmg transpobic bigotry etc… I class those things as evil and. Musk has quite a list of them.
I respect what he did with SpaceX but given his huge wealth and influence, Musk as an individual is currently doing a lot of harm to the world and has become a threat to Democracy and is making the world actively worse by his words and actions. That’s why I want him removed from power (everywhere really!) and stopped despite the good things he’s created with SpaceX whch I’d like to see under new and more responsible and decent ownership.
John Morales @107 The answer remains: it’s neither cheap nor easy nor effective, on Earth.
But space (certainly beyond the Earth-Moon system) is not Earth.
The only answer you’ve given to this so far was @91: For Antarctica, people are far cheaper, because it’s so very comparatively less difficult for people. Gravity. Radiation shielding. Air. Opportunity to evacuate. Opportunity for resupply. Real-time communication. That sort of thing.
And most of that simply doesn’t hold up.
The last three points are simply about distance. It’s not actually a disadvantage humans have: isolation is simply a fact of travelling to a very distant place. Humans have no opportunity for evacuation. Robots have no opportunity for repair, recharge, etc. The lack of real-time communication also impacts both — indeed, it impacts robots worse. No real time communication means normal tele-operation is impossible, and the robots we send all have to be at least semi-autonomous, executing carefully pre-prepared instructions rather than being controlled in real-time (a fact whose hazards and difficulty I touched on before.) On the other hand, people are already highly autonomous. Not being able to get instantaneous answers from mission control about things (or vice versa) will certainly be inconvenient, but shouldn’t be disastrous. Crews of humans have operated far from contact with support or command before. And they know what they signed up for. A mission that far out will necessarily be self reliant enough to wait 15 minutes for an answer.
Returning to the first three, these are true, so far as it goes, but they don’t actually show that humans are more expensive on a per unit or per unit of effect basis. (Let alone how exactly robots magically become harder to use or less effective on Earth.) They simply point to the fact that humans take a lot more initial overhead in terms of infrastructure.
For example, there are up to 150 people at the Amundsen-Scott south pole station. Fully 1200 people at McMurdo.
A space ship with capacity for even 150 people (let alone 1200) would necessarily be large enough to be designed with, e.g., a spinning section to simulate gravity, water, fuel tanks or other materials configured to provide shelter from at least the worst radiation events*, and sufficient space and/or power to bring and/or recycle its own air.
It’s true that, assuming we knew how to build it exactly, a space ship large enough for 150 people would be very large and expensive. Larger and more expensive than 150 rovers. Or even 1500 rovers.
But, once delivered to a planetary surface, those 150 humans would also be capable of doing far more research than 1500 rovers. Certainly capable of doing it faster than the ~5000 years it would take to dribble out that many rovers.
…Much the same as how the 150 researchers at Amundsen-Scott work faster than 1500 hypothetical robots. Despite the fact that, due to the aforementioned tele-operation and remoteness, robots are in fact easier to operate on Earth than in deep space.
This greater effectiveness is the reason we have humans at Amundsen-Scott. And I re-iterate that this is reason we would have humans on Mars, if we could.
The problem is, we can’t — either we simply haven’t designed some of the systems yet (air and food recycling has some way to go, and radiation is a very thorny challenge), or the overhead of building (and, in particular, launching) something large enough to start taking advantage of humans’ better returns to scale in this situation is simply too big an investment.
jack lecou@106,
Have you noticed that people had been doing Antarctic exploration and science long before there were any such things as robots? So in that case, people had a long start. But as it happens: Cold, remote and risky: why Australia is turning to robots to boost its presence in Antarctica.
It’s odd that you don’t see how this line of argument applies to advances in robotics. Or maybe not – I think you don’t want to see that, because you’re emotionally wedded to the idea of human space colonisation, so you convince yourself the limitations of current robots are permanent features. But unless you think people work by magic, it’s hard to see why you would think that. You keep stressing the limitations of robots, when (say) the robots now being sent to Mars, or those (mostly remote-operated at present) now used in search and rescue, or those in factories and warehouses, would have been impossible to build even a dozen years ago.
We have of course absolutely no idea whether this would actually prevent the ill-effects found in people who have been in microgravity for months. Unless the spinning section was very large, spinning it fast enough to simulate earth-strength gravity would produce a significant Coriolis pseudo-force. And of course once on the moon, or Mars, you’d be in reduced gravity most of the time.
^Sigh, the whole false dichoomy of robots vs humans when it seems clear to me that there’s a role for both..
@108. John Morales : Loved that book and Anne McCaffrey as an author generally as a kid..
@105. John Morales : It also amuses me how grandiose the term ‘astronaut’ is… ‘star sailor’, it literally means.
Not quite as grandiose as Cosmonaut or , I think, Taikonaut both of which are more cosmos-logical in scope.. & sailing among the stars doesn’t necessarily mean sailing to them..Of cours esailing to a Cosmos rather than sailing within one is even more ambitious although Stephen Baxter did have (astronauts) doing so in his manifold novels….
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold_Trilogy )
StevoR @117: I think the primary meaning for modern Russian KOCMOC (cosmos) is ‘space’, not ‘universe’.
KG @116 I’m old enough to remember when there were men on the moon. At which point, a computer with way less power than my phone occupied a fair-sized room, and the nearest thing to a robot was a wind-up toy which could lurch a few steps on a flat surface. Which technology has been advancing faster?
Computers and robots aren’t actually quite the same thing. And it’s an important distinction here.
Computers have indeed progressed by leaps and since the 60s or 70s. But robotics has been advancing at about the same incremental pace as everything else (and, as in those other fields the aspects of robotics that are most aided by access to raw compute power advancing more quickly than the rest of the field).
So I think you need to be more specific about what kind of advances you’re actually talking about here.
Robots capable of performing research on Mars as effectively as a human team wouldn’t just need to be “Opportunity, but with ChatGPT”. They need to be able to manipulate their environment, in extremely varied and flexible ways. They need to have some capacity for improvisation, self repair, and reconfiguration. And they need to be able to do all of that reliably for years at a time, with a human around to change their batteries or grease a stuck actuator.
That really is light years beyond what we have now. As you say, there are now quite sophisticated robots performing some limited functions in spaces like search and rescue or in warehouses. But never the same robots in each environment. Even if they’re the same basic chassis, a robot that wants to switch jobs from the warehouse to the fire department will need a human to unbolt its ‘box shelving’ arm and bolt on a ‘rubble digging’ arm. Probably it will need to have some other joints and motors and sensors reconfigured as well. Even a robot moving from “earthquake rescue” to “fire rescue” might need reconfiguration. And, at the end of a hard day of search and rescue, it comes back to a human operator to get bolts tightened and batteries charged and rubber booties changed.
The same for those Antarctic exploration “robots”. Those are exactly the kind of drones and helpers that can augment a human mission. Not replace it. I think you’ll find that those are nothing like as autonomous as Mars rovers. Their complexity will be directly proportional to their distance from a human operator or maintenance team. Robost autonomous buoy that floats around for years taking passive sensor readings? Absolutely. Autonomous supply sled or drone boat? Sure, seems useful. But the latter will get checked over and fitted out — by humans — before every trip. And will always be reachable by a human mechanic if they ever go down completely.
…The same for the autonomous military drones that have been brought up a couple of times in recent posts. I’m sure there are guys at DARPA or wherever who are even now scrambling to make a terrifying new generation of octocopters that can, say, autonomously locate enemy trenches or artillery pieces and drop grenades on them or whatever. And they will probably be able to do a great job. But we are still not talking about fully autonomous T-1000 style total replacements for human soldiers for some time yet. At the end of the day — literally — those drones are going to be flying back to home base, where a human soldier is going to restock their grenade magazines, check their batteries and propellers, etc. And while it’s certainly theoretically possible to also design another set of autonomous robots to do those tasks (and then another set of robots to service those robots…), there’s really no point: that would be just another set of specialized machines with their own development costs, not general purpose autonomous C3POs or something. The latter are just not anywhere on the horizon AFAICT.
And this is the way it still works in space too, for the foreseeable future. It’s just a lot more difficult because there isn’t an operator back at base camp. If you want to be able to do experiments on soil chemistry or something with a Mars rover, you can’t just send it up along with a little crate full of reagents and glassware in foam peanuts for it to unpack and use. Nope. First you need to design a rover that’s robust and redundant enough to function entirely on its own for years at a time. Then, you have to spend a few tens of millions of dollars to plan out and engineer each little specialized experiment module. For the chemistry, maybe some kind of clever little revolving turntable with the various experiment stations, magazines to dispense N sample containers and M reagent dispensers and what not. The whole apparatus will be built by a team of engineers on Earth, stocked with supplies, and then carefully assembled and tested and bolted up into the bowels of the finished rover somewhere, never to be touched again.
That engineering and testing need to be very thorough (and expensive) because where it’s going, there isn’t a maintenance guy (or magic all-purpose C3PO unit) who can drive out on a rover and pop open the access panel to fix a dispenser jam. Best case it goes through all N experiments in the hopper. But if the mission gets some extra time and you want to test an N+1st sample, forget it. Wait 5 years for the next rover. If the results of experiment 17 make you wish you’d loaded a M+1 types of reagent, forget it. Wait 5 years for the next rover. And so on.
The fundamental impracticality of that kind of thing is precisely why the next steps in the Mars rover sequence will involve sample return. Two-way trips, so that we can get physical samples into the hands of a human being with a proper lab. It’s almost like they’re useful to have around or something.
So are those magic C3POs possible? Sure. Maybe. And for all I know, they could be a week out from their big debut announcement at GenericTechCon2023 or whatever. But there’s no particular reason to think so. Computer advances alone aren’t enough — you still need progress on the actual physical mechanisms. And some experts don’t really think the “AI” we’re seeing now is necessarily the pathway toward a general purpose intelligence anyway.
So the smart money is that anything that can function as a general purpose Martian explorer — to such a degree as to overturn the existing high-cost rover paradigm — is decades away. Especially because there just isn’t even any pressing need for the kind of characteristics that would make a good explorer: on Earth, the incentives are to develop robots for repetitive tasks. There’s always a human around for stuff that requires adaptability and improvisation, which is more fun.
(…without a human around to change their batteries or grease a stuck actuator.)
StevoR, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-67542129
Jack, https://xkcd.com/695/
jack lecou@119,
You’re right that advances in robotics have not been as fast as those in computing generally – and in fact, most of the latter have been due to advances in storage and computation speed – the basic principles behind ChatGPT were developed in the 1980s, it’s the increase in data availability and computing power that made ChatGPT and other more useful applications possible. (Side-note: Geoff Hinton was a postdoc already working on “neural networks” when I was starting my AI doctorate at the University of Sussex, but I stuck with the symbolic approach (GOFAI – “Good Old-Fashioned AI”) and eventually left the field.) But there have in fact been impressive advances in robot locomotion and manipulation, partly due to that same increase in computational power. The basic principles of “deep learning” can also be applied in robotics, at least some of the learning can be done in simulation, and of course, what is learned can be transferred between robots. And as I said, I’d expect the events in Ukraine to vastly increase the military-industrial investment into increasingly autonomous robots (the main weakness of the drones that have played so large a part is that their communications with the operator can be jammed).
I absolutely agree. That’s partly why I fully expect human-occupied bases on the moon – but as with space stations, the inhabitants will spend much of their time and effort maintaining the systems that keep them alive, until robots can do it for them. At which point, it’ll become increasingly obvious that the humans are just expensive passengers. And getting humans to Mars (and keeping them alive there) is obviously far more difficult than for the moon. Need something from earth you hadn’t thought of? Accident to something you had thought of, and absolutely need? Case of appendicitis? Serious falling-out between crew? Tough: you’re on your own. A robot can be powered down and wait for a couple of years. A human, not so much. So I don’t believe people are going to Mars this century – and if they do, I’d be surprised if they all come back alive.
KG @116 It’s odd that you don’t see how this line of argument applies to advances in robotics. Or maybe not – I think you don’t want to see that, because you’re emotionally wedded to the idea of human space colonisation, so you convince yourself the limitations of current robots are permanent features.
I think I’ve been pretty consistent about this:
The present reality is one where robot exploration (the kind we do now) is incredibly expensive and painstakingly slow, but is also, for various reasons, the only thing we can (or are willing to) do.
The future is of course a matter of speculation. Neither set of technologies — to allow humans to explore with complete safety, or to allow robots to explore with something approaching our general competence — actually exist.
Hopefully we can agree on that much.
The only thing that rankles me, then, is the assertion that manned space exploration is “more expensive and difficult” than all-robotic exploration. That’s just facts not in evidence at present.
What we actually know for a fact is that all-robotic exploration has so far been frightfully difficult and expensive, for reasons previously outlined. A single rover mission costs in the neighborhood of $2.5 billion. Rovers are magnificent accomplishments from a technical perspective, and have generated virtually all of the data we have about Mars — but the sum total of that data is still actually pretty small. These are facts.
On the other hand, the costs of a manned mission to Mars can only be estimated, but a few years ago an SLS/Orion-based mission was in the ballpark of $2 trillion (total for multiple missions over decades, with the establishment of a permanent base). Now, that’s a 1000x larger upfront price tag, yes, but how many times as much science is it? Certainly the evidence from common sense and literally every other field of endeavor suggests that, once they’re there, on-site human exploration (or, more correctly, human-machine cooperation) can produce a lot more “science” than robots alone. (I won’t try to woo your coldly rational mind with other intangibles like inspiration or optimism.)
So it’s kind of like buying toilet paper at Costco — the sticker price might be higher, but you’re also getting a lot more in the package. Or maybe more like how solar panels [read: ‘human space exploration’] pay for themselves on relatively short timescales, if you can afford to take the upfront hit for the installation cost [read: ‘enabling technology like cheaper heavy lift vehicles’]. If you can’t afford that investment, that’s fine, but it’s not actually correct to say “paying the power company is cheaper” — it literally isn’t in that case. It’s just all you can afford to do.
Now, obviously some of that last part is conjecture. And you’re welcome to conjecture right back about how you think things are going to play out for future robotic exploration capabilities. Color me a little less sanguine, but I see where you’re coming from.
Don’t forget what started this thread though: it’s literally about the test of a project that’s hoping to slash payload costs in the very near and foreseeable future. The same payload costs which make up a disproportionately big chunk of that human expedition price tag: humans need big vehicles, and massive quantities of air, water, fuel and other consumables, so they’re proportionately more dependent on low launch costs. And that was my earlier point: technically, Starship brings launch costs for robotic and human expeditions down equally, with complex impacts on both. But at least in the near to medium term, I think a dramatic reduction in sticker shock for human expeditions will make them look relatively more attractive, and, indeed, cost effective. At least to the Moon.
KG @123 I absolutely agree. That’s partly why I fully expect human-occupied bases on the moon – but as with space stations, the inhabitants will spend much of their time and effort maintaining the systems that keep them alive, until robots can do it for them. At which point, it’ll become increasingly obvious that the humans are just expensive passengers.
Well, the thing is, that may be all it takes. A major human presence — in the 100s or 1000s — on the Moon and near Earth, for whatever purpose, implies both a pressing need to research solutions for the hazards, and ready access to the perfect conditions to do that research in. Even without trying, discoveries are bound to be made. By the time we’ve been on the Moon for a couple decades, it’s not unreasonable to expect that many of the big issues currently hobbling human exploration — radiation, gravity, resource management, food production — will have practical solutions or workarounds, if they exist. At the very least, the limits and risks will be more well understood.
Perhaps during the same time, robotics makes great leaps forward as well, but as the barriers to human expeditions have also been lowered, I don’t really see why that would lead to a mass retreat.
Particularly becasuse, as you and others have alluded, robots capable of entirely unsupervised, adaptive, autonomous exploration are also basically the holy grail: it’s a couple steps at most from something like that to a machine you could just send, whether to Vermont or Ganymede, with instructions to “build me a comfortable place to live”, and have it happen. It’s easy to mock speculation about a post-scarcity society, but I also think that is functionally what you are proposing. Assuming we manage to wrest the benefits of that technology away from the capitalists, talk about how “expensive” the “passengers” are would be much less relevant. (We’d all be passengers in life, one way or another at that point anyway — I don’t think we should just lay down and die.)
So, assuming there are still significant numbers of humans who haven’t changed their minds about the “Man-has-always guff” at that point — and our technoculture hasn’t collapsed, natch — it’s hard to see how the trends would be going against it. If humans haven’t gone into space at that point, that seems like it would be the point where they begin…
KG @109 I notice you don’t actually give your answer. I guess that’s because it would too obviously just be the old “Man-has-always” guff. It doesn’t take an investment of trillions of dollars (and the corresponding labour, materials and expertise) for it to be possible for people to write novels or build furniture, provided conditions on earth continue to be hospitable to human life. The bulk of those resources would be better applied in ensuring that people can continue to live (and live better) on the one planet that provides air we can breathe, water we can drink, shielding from radiation, etc. – with a comparatively tiny amount used to continue the scientific study of the universe beyond it.
It may not take trillions for an individual novelist, of course, but as a point of reference, the entertainment industry is something like $2.3 trillion annually. That’s more than the cost of the above estimate for an all-up, full-price Mars-base, except every year instead of just one over the course of a couple decades. And if something like Starship can bring launch costs down, the cost of that kind of effort might well fall into the range of just a couple years worth of, say, the sports betting industry. Future advances can only really bring it down even further.
Now, obviously you’re welcome to your own opinions about whether any of that is an appropriate allocation of resources. I can’t necessarily change your mind. Or even enough minds to matter, democratically speaking — maybe people would rather have their sports betting. But I certainly don’t think that amount of resources spent on space would be a waste. Not even if it didn’t have tangible side benefits (which you and I both know it probably would).
…but as with space stations, the inhabitants will spend much of their time and effort maintaining the systems that keep them alive
I don’t think this is a particularly sensible extrapolation. There’s never been a crew of more than about a dozen on the space station. Even if it were true that they spend all their time simply maintaining systems (and it’s not far off), it doesn’t follow that the next dozen would, and so on. It’s almost as easy to change a 20-person CO2 scrubber as a 10-person one.
KG @123Need something from earth you hadn’t thought of? Accident to something you had thought of, and absolutely need? Case of appendicitis? Serious falling-out between crew? Tough: you’re on your own.
Those don’t really seem like serious objections. I think we have to assume a basic level of competence on the part of mission planners — grant that they at least won’t forget anything immediately life threatening, and that they will make the appropriate analysis as to the level of redundancy needed.
There’s a good chance anything else could be improvised — a mission that large will have tools, and lots of spare parts and materials that could be adapted. Look at what the crew of Apollo 13 cobbled together on their tiny little ship. That kind of adaption is one of the reasons you want a human crew along.
The dangers you speak of are real, but, I think, also between the explorers and their own consciences. Past generations of explorers didn’t exactly have medevac choppers on speed dial either. (Even now there are places where people venture without such luxuries — Everest, nuclear submarines, etc.)
KG @123 A robot can be powered down and wait for a couple of years. A human, not so much.
Powered down and wait for what, exactly?
I mean, Let’s say we forgot to install an argon canister or something on a rover. Oops. So, OK, suppose the rover can go into standby mode and it will be “fine”, technically, for as long as needed.
But then what? Suppose we send a new rocket, and, two years later, manage to parachute down a crate full of argon canisters within a few hundred meters of the rover. Who’s going to install them?
The only way that’s going to work out is if the rover just happened to have been designed from the beginning with some kind of elaborate self-changing argon canister docking system. OR, maybe we spend an extra few hundred million to design and build a whole new kind of rover that has the right tools and programming to disassemble the first one, install the canister, and then bolt it back up again properly.
Those seem like two equally bad ideas. In almost every case, it would be much less complex and risky — and probably less expensive — to just send a brand new rover. (Or operate a Mars base, so an adaptable human maintenance crew could hop over and fix things.)
In general, this is a real problem with rovers that need to run unattended for years. One which can’t be glossed over just by saying, “well, the military will be making more autonomous drones because of what we’re seeing in Ukraine, so rovers will get better”. One doesn’t really follow from the other because, like I said before, the problem spaces are actually very, very different.
Jack:
They’re based on the concept that machines are more expendable than people.
Well, both are hazardous to health. And, again, machines are more expendable.
And the amount of R&D going on in the drone space is quite remarkable.
John Morales They’re based on the concept that machines are more expendable than people.
No, they only make sense if the concept is that humans aren’t supposed to take any risks at all. This is, in addition to being an impossibility, contrary to human nature. Humans enthusiastically take on equal or greater risks all the time for far lesser causes.
Well, both are hazardous to health. And, again, machines are more expendable.
And the amount of R&D going on in the drone space is quite remarkable.
Fire and poison are also both hazardous to health. It doesn’t mean mitigations for those hazards are remotely in the same problem space.
Again, autonomous operation and unattended operation are actually two different things.
A military drone that can fly over and drop a bomb without a radio link is one [scary] thing. Get back to me when it can also change out its own ammunition, and subsequently fly the same mission for 5 or 10 years straight without ever coming within 33 million miles of a human operator…
jack,
More like humans don’t need to take any needless risks.
(Maybe save them for when they are actually necessary?)
Wow, your cognitive blinkers are tremendously effective.
Get back to me when a human can fly the same mission for 5 or 10 years straight without ever coming within 33 million miles of another human.
(https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/)
Get back to me when a human can fly the same mission for 5 or 10 years straight without ever coming within 33 million miles of another human.
Whoosh?
Humans don’t need to do that*. Neither do military drones. That’s the point.
Mars rovers do.
Although, in point of fact, given a big enough pile of supplies, I don’t see why you think that one couldn’t.
(Botched the formatting — last line is supposed to be the footnote.)
@129 More like humans don’t need to take any needless risks.
Nobody would be forcing them.
jack @132, point is that needless risks are needless, whether or not someone is forcing people to be subject to them. And, when it comes to people in space, very very very expensive.
Presumably, most people will at least expect to come back. Alive.
“NASA’s Stardust was the first spacecraft to bring samples from a comet to Earth. After a five-year journey, the spacecraft flew within 155 miles (250 kilometers) of comet P/Wild 2 and collected samples of dust and volatiles from the comet’s coma. Enroute, it also collected samples of interstellar dust and flew by asteroid 5535 Annefrank. Stardust sealed its collected matter inside a sample reentry capsule, which separated from Stardust and landed in the Utah desert on Jan. 15, 2006. The main spacecraft was given an extended mission known as New Exploration of Tempel 1 (NExT) that included a flyby of Comet Tempel 1 (or 9P/Tempel). It flew within 112 miles (181 kilometers), of the comet on Feb. 15, 2011, returning 72 images.”
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/stardust/
John: …point is that needless risks are needless, whether or not someone is forcing people to be subject to them. And, when it comes to people in space, very very very expensive.
No, the point is that you’re presenting it as a binary, when it isn’t.
Nothing is without risk. Have you ever driven to the store to buy ice cream? That was, in fact, a (not entirely insignificant) risk to your life. Did you need the ice cream? Well, then I guess it was a “needless” risk.
Is going to Mars riskier than a drive to the store for ice cream? Sure. Astronomically riskier. But so are the rewards. Both tangible and intangible. As with any other activity, it comes down to to weighing those, in some cases on an individual basis.
So then it comes back to the question of expense — addressed ad nauseum elsewhere.
Presumably, most people will at least expect to come back. Alive.
You might be surprised.
Um, you yourself quoted what it is you respond to: “needless risk”.
Nobody has ever gone to Mars yet, so nobody has undertaken that risk.
(On the other hand, machines have gone there)
—
I like the cut of your jib.
Quite applicable to pesky things like medical ethics — as long as the subject is willing, no prob, right?
I note PZ currently has another post up mentioning space tourism.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism
I must concede that the very point of space tourism is to have people travel in space. So, people not optional.
(That’s for real tourism, of course. Virtual tourism is another thing)
Um, you yourself quoted what it is you respond to: “needless risk”.
Yep. And, once again, the fact that nothing is without risk means that anything “needless” is by definition also a needless risk. Like venturing out into the world for ice cream. Or a walk in the park.
Merely declaring something a “needless risk” is not actually some kind of trump card that magically short circuits the rest of the decision making process. I’m not sure I can spell it out any more plainly.
Nobody has ever gone to Mars yet, so nobody has undertaken that risk.
That’s either a non-sequitur, or obscenely circular reasoning.
Quite applicable to pesky things like medical ethics — as long as the subject is willing, no prob, right?
Just pointing out that your presumption is flawed.
I don’t say we necessarily should let people go in those circumstances. But it’s early days to talk about the exact risks we’d be willing to tolerate (individually and collectively). Without a much more concrete mission plan to evaluate — upside and downside — presuming it’s guaranteed death sentence is just as presumptuous as presuming it’s a walk in the park (ahem).
Yeah, but you were going on about how much more utility and value one gets out of putting humans in the pointy end, and I’m noting nope, that sort of value is purely speculative on your part.
It’s the truth, is what it is. Hard to confront, for some.
Again, no need for machines to have to come back to Earth.
Is presuming all that stuff (you know, shielding, living room, consumables, need for a return trip) presumptuous, too? No need for any of that without the apes.
I grant that the return trip bit is optional, given volunteers, but they have to stay alive until they get there, no? Otherwise, not much point to it.
(Maybe people with terminal diseases, that’s the go!)
Yeah, but you were going on about how much more utility and value one gets out of putting humans in the pointy end, and I’m noting nope, that sort of value is purely speculative on your part.
No, you were on about risks. That’s one of the things we balance against the utility and value.
You literally haven’t discussed the value at all. Unless you mean that you were accomplishing that by self-declaring the whole thing to be “needless” and thus without utility or value. Assuming the consequent sure is convenient, I guess. Forgive me if I’m less than impressed though.
It’s the truth, is what it is. Hard to confront, for some.
And sea anemones are animals, not flowers. It’s the truth. QED and all that.
Is presuming all that stuff (you know, shielding, living room, consumables, need for a return trip) presumptuous, too? No need for any of that without the apes.
Is that a question?
A human mission would have shielding, living space, consumables, and — in every serious plan I’ve seen — a return vehicle. I’m not sure what that has to do with “presuming”.
Hey, as long as it’s not me or my loved ones, I am more than happy for people to put themselves at risk. And I’m more than happy for billionaires to spend $$$ so that possibility can come closer to fruition.
Thing is, most enterprises aren’t quite as gung-ho as I am.
(Thus the unmanned space program and solar system exploration)
It doesn’t matter what I write, your cognitive blinkers (not Morton’s Demon, but similar) will keep you from understanding my point.
If it can be done for $, why do it for $$$$$ instead just so you can have people go along?
(sigh)
Look: you wrote “Is going to Mars riskier than a drive to the store for ice cream? Sure.”
See, what I’m trying to get across to you is that nobody has gone to Mars.
In short, “going to Mars” is not an actual thing, it’s speculation.
It follows that, since it is not a thing, it poses no risk to anyone.
Now, driving to the store for an ice-cream is indeed a thing, so it actually has some risks.
<
blockquote>Is that a question?
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blockquote>
No. You wrote “presuming it’s guaranteed death sentence” whereas what I’m on about is the vastly larger expense of mitigating such risks as can be mitigated when apes have to go into the can, too.
You were the one to introduce that term, for the purpose of imputing that I
thoughtpresumed space travel was a guaranteed death sentence, whereas I am not making any bones that it’s a shit-ton more complicated, more expensive, and much riskier.When anything goes wrong, everything becomes about keeping the apes in the can safe and able to return home, instead.
(I’ve seen the movies! ;) )
If it can be done for $, why do it for $$$$$ instead just so you can have people go along?
No. As I’ve argued in detail — repeatedly — the facts actually available say the cost of doings things with rovers is more like $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ — remember, you’re not just counting one rover. You’re counting enough to get the job done. It will take a few millennia too, at the current pace.
Please feel free to argue against the arguments I’ve actually made, but just asserting the opposite isn’t convincing.
(And sure, maybe along the way we get KG’s self-programming, self-reconfiguring sci-fi replicator bots to speed up the process. But at that point $ won’t mean much anyway. In the meantime, we have to compare scenarios that presume something at least a little closer to the tech we actually have.)
It follows that, since it is not a thing, it poses no risk to anyone.
Umm. You know it’s not fair to pull people’s leg like that. It’s the internet, and I can’t tell if you’re kidding.
In the somewhat disappointing eventuality that you’re actually serious, I suggest maybe you go and look up the concept of risk again, and how it relates to the concept of plans, for, you know, things you haven’t done yet, and then come back when you’re ready to have a discussion like a human adult capable of object permanence and making plans for the future.
No. You wrote “presuming it’s guaranteed death sentence” whereas what I’m on about is the vastly larger expense of mitigating such risks as can be mitigated when apes have to go into the can, too.
Then that’s a non-sequitur. Those considerations are already baked into the discussion the rest of us have been having.
It’s like if we were discussing vacation plans, and I said something like, “It looks to me like flying will be cheaper than driving. The plane tickets are pricey, yes, but once you add up all the gas and restaurants and motels along the way, a road trip would actually be much more expensive. Plus, on the plane, we’ll get there at least two whole days earlier.”
And then you come in, and, without actually addressing any of those arguments, say something like, “Your enthusiasm for air travel is making you blind! Airplanes cost millions of dollars! They are more expensive because they have to have all kinds of systems like pressurized cabins and redundant flight controls to keep people safe 40,000 feet in the air.”
It’s…kind of weird.
If you want to keep thinking it’s far cheaper to send than machines, I can’t stop you, but I’m damn sure that the people actually paying for the missions don’t see it your way.
When you compare routine activities with things you haven’t done yet to contrast the risks, you are speculating about those risks.
Amusingly, your very first comment on this thread was about how such risks were only to be found by expensive experimentation and one expected booms in the process; that’s indicative that at some level you realise that those risks are as yet unknown. If we knew how to do it, we’d have done it, and would actually know the risks.
You imagine it’s a non sequitur because you misread what I wrote, and instead responded to what you imagined I had written. Again, I can’t help you with that other than to point it out.
Flying is a thing. Travelling to Mars is not a thing. Never been done yet.
So, no. Nothing alike.
If you want to keep thinking it’s far cheaper to send than machines, I can’t stop you, but I’m damn sure that the people actually paying for the missions don’t see it your way.
I mean, if you mean the taxpayers or the Congresscritters, no, maybe not. But while the ones writing the checks, I don’t think they’re really the folks I would trust to know the answer. The people planning the missions are another story — they’re the ones coming up with the estimates, after all. Opinions there are a lot more mixed, so you might want to check your certainty.
This little appeal to authority kind of sums up your whole argument here though, which is, “they don’t do it that way, therefore that way must be worse”, along with a couple concrete, but rather random and obvious, examples of the downsides from ‘that way’ thrown in for seasoning. I guess in your mind, that closes the case.
But that’s transparently circular. There’re plenty of things we don’t do even though they’re significantly better, or even cheaper. Especially in the public policy space. Universal health insurance*, say.
Tossing out the little selective bits and pieces of blatantly obvious trivia like “have you realized humans need air to breathe” doesn’t actually save the argument.
(Indeed it is, mostly, just bizarre. Even if I try to be charitable and interpret those little digressions as some kind of actual argument, all it really does is remind me of, for example, global warming deniers. The ones who come along and say something like, “But have you considered that the sun is hot? Checkmate, scientists!” Right. Because obviously professional climates scientists never thought to factor in, you know, the sun into their models. Same way that a space enthusiast, or NASA mission planner, estimating costs for a trip to Mars might forget that astronauts, you know, breathe oxygen. “Checkmate, space enthusiasts!” indeed.)
When you compare routine activities with things you haven’t done yet to contrast the risks, you are speculating about those risks.
YES!
We are speculating about the risks. And the benefits. And everything else. And it is a given that there is necessarily far more uncertainty about our evaluations of these speculative things than with mundane things.
That is the nature of discussing a thing that hasn’t been done before.
But, and I’m asking sincerely here, what in the actual nine hells is your point?
Amusingly, your very first comment on this thread was about how such risks were only to be found by expensive experimentation and one expected booms in the process; that’s indicative that at some level you realise that those risks are as yet unknown. If we knew how to do it, we’d have done it, and would actually know the risks.
That doesn’t follow at all, you innumerate savage. And it’s not the way anything works.
Suppose I estimate, or rely on the estimates of experts, that there is a 75% chance that the rocket test will go “boom” sometime before the test is complete.
Later, the rocket indeed does go boom before the test is complete. I say, “that’s the nature of these tests — we should expect some booms during this process”.
Your big-brain conclusion from that would be that we didn’t know anything about the risks? How do you figure?
More importantly, we’re not going to be putting a manned Mars mission on top of a test rocket. There’s a lot of steps between here and there. First, fully successful tests where all the bugs are worked out, before a production model is finalized. Then lots of unmanned flights of that. Probably 100s. Hopefully all successful, but if not, the failures would be carefully analyzed and corrected. Eventually, a human-rated version of the vehicle would be produced, tested, and certified. Only then would a manned launch be performed.
At that point, an astronaut riding that vehicle to space could be reasonably assured that at least that part of the trip would be successful. (For a suitable definition of reasonable — obviously she would understand that the risk is very much not zero, and even fairly elevated compared to “normal” activities.)
Things could still go wrong — manufacturing defect, unexpected weather, whatever — and there would be very high bars of uncertainty on the risk she faces. But that’s not the same as those risks being completely unknowable or non-quantifiable.
The remainder of her very long trip would be the same — each module and vehicle and system tested in similar ways, in order to reach a level or overall risk and uncertainty that everyone is prepared to accept.
Again, small children can understand this process. How do you not?
Flying is a thing. Travelling to Mars is not a thing. Never been done yet.
So, no. Nothing alike.
Oh sweetie, I didn’t say they were the same thing. I wasn’t even comparing them. I was making an analogy about the kind of argument one would need to make to evaluate costs, to contrast it with the kind of woefully inadequate “argument” that you’ve been making.
-————–
* No doubt this will be the cue for another pitiable little round of weird know nothingism and non-sequitur: “we only know universal health insurance is better because it’s been done before. But nobody’s ever been to Mars, that’s just a fact. Why do your cognitive blinders keep you from admitting it?”
Because, yeah, it’s not like anybody ever implemented a new program or policy for the first time. It’s not like it’s possible to collect data from experiments, pilot programs or prepare forecasts and estimates in order to evaluate a proposal. It’s not like human civilization ever does new things, or has developed entire branches of study into how to evaluate things before doing them. That would be impossible — because as everyone knows, if something hasn’t been done, it means we know absolutely nothing about it!
I can for sure check how many crewed missions have been done, historically.
Like, people landed on the moon — an interplanetary trip, in your estimation.
And people have spent some time in Earth orbit.
That is it. That’s the entirety of it.
Meanwhile, rovers on Mars, exploratory trips to the outer planets, probes beyond the Solar System. No people doing that stuff. And, to my knowledge, no planners complaining that’s the most expensive option.
Nope. It’s more like “they do it the way they do it because they can’t do it with crewed vehicles with their budget”. Something you yourself expressed, earlier.
Basically, an appeal to reality, not to authority.
(Though technically, reality is the highest authority)
So, are you insinuating we could have been doing all the space exploration significantly better, or even cheaper with crewed craft the whole time? :)
(Silly mission planners!)
Putting words into my mouth certainly doesn’t actually save the argument.
Now, pointing out one has to carry that air and make sure it doesn’t leak out and that it gets scrubbed and so forth just to have canned apes, that’s a valid point. It’s all overhead that’s unnecessary without the apes. And that goes for all consumables, too.
And waste disposal, obs. Poo in space, not good.
Well, there you go.
Had you written something like “Is going to Mars riskier than a drive to the store for ice cream? I speculate that it Sure is. Astronomically riskier. But I speculate so are the rewards. Both tangible and intangible. As with any other activity, it comes down to to weighing those speculations against known facts, in some cases on an individual basis.”
then you would have got a different response.
(How safe is a drive to the store for ice cream in Gaza right now?)
Um, it was you who wrote this (my emphasis):
“But things burning themselves up in spectacular ways is pretty fundamental to the process of pushing things to new limits when you’re working with machines whose purpose is to constructively channel tons of 6000 degree, 3500 psi gases per second into an energy output that can be measured in units of “simultaneous Hoover Dams”. Not everything can be simulated, and whether or not its done in sight of the public, destructive iteration is absolutely a part of the process.”
You could not have been clearer that we don’t know how to do it and thus the destructive iteration, and you’ve also made it clear that we do want to do it.
So, it follows perfectly that if we knew how to do it, we’d be doing it.
That it’s very very expensive to send crewed vehicles into space, because of our as-yet primitive technology. And that, if one wants to do space exploration, machines are the way to go.
Big brain, eh? Heh.
You actually quoted me (“would actually know the risks.”) in the context of noting that those risks are speculative, not actually known.
Educated guesswork is not knowledge, but neither is it not knowing anything.
So. I figure that, once someone has gone to Mars (and hopefully returned) we will actually know those risks, and at the moment they can only be simulated.
And, as someone whose opinion you clearly respect wrote: “Not everything can be simulated”.
That’s where we were in the middle of the last century, too.
Expensive, speculative, hopeful. And expensive, too.
(Except robot probes have done a shitload of exploration since then, without people)
That’s you putting words into that straw dummy.
Speculative, is what I wrote.
(What are the risks of fusion power plants compared to fission power plants?)
<snicker>
You seriously imagined I thought you claimed travelling to Mars and going to the shop were the same thing?
Remarkable how hard your subconscious works to evade the issue at hand — again: travelling to Mars and going to the shop are categorically different in that one is a thing that exists and the other is not.
Now, if you don’t think that comparing imaginary things to real things is to compare things that are nothing alike, I have to accept that. But it’s gonna confuse you a lot.
Well, I’m having fun.
You look funny arguing with that straw dummy.
David Brin is enthusiastic: https://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2023/11/space-resources-and-advances-plus.html
Meanwhile, rovers on Mars, exploratory trips to the outer planets, probes beyond the Solar System. No people doing that stuff. And, to my knowledge, no planners complaining that’s the most expensive option.
I feel like you’re not looking very hard. Here for example, is a 2012 paper making much the same point that I am:
(And as he goes on to point out, that’s despite the fact that Apollo wasn’t really even conceived as a scientific expedition — the science was tacked on rather cheaply at basically the last minute.)
I don’t know how easy it is to find similar sentiments within NASA itself. I’m sure there are some individuals saying something like that if you know where to look. But institutionally, it’s not a smart thing to say. NASA’s administration is happy enough to do what it can with the pittance it does get. It wouldn’t necessarily help matters for its people to be say, “this stuff we’ve been doing with the robots is relatively inefficient and ultimately only capable of getting us so far; what we really need is an order of magnitude more money to do it properly.” At least not too loudly. Nobody wants to get shitcanned like the SSC…
Nope. It’s more like “they do it the way they do it because they can’t do it with crewed vehicles with their budget”. Something you yourself expressed, earlier.
Yes indeed. That was kind of the key point there: with their budget.
If I give you $1.00 a day for food, you might be able to scrounge something together if you’re clever enough, but it probably isn’t going to be good for you. Nor will it be very efficient — you’ll be spending everything each day, and never have even $20 together at one time to buy a pot and a bag of rice.
(Since I apparently have to make this specific: no, I don’t think going to Mars is as simple as buying a bag of rice. It’s just an analogy about budget constraints and efficiency.)
Putting words into my mouth certainly doesn’t actually save the argument.
Now, pointing out one has to carry that air and make sure it doesn’t leak out and that it gets scrubbed and so forth just to have canned apes, that’s a valid point. It’s all overhead that’s unnecessary without the apes. And that goes for all consumables, too.
And waste disposal, obs. Poo in space, not good.
How exactly am I putting words in your mouth, if in the next sentence you’re saying the same very stupid words, and literally still claiming it’s a valid point?
If you don’t understand why it’s stupid, here’s a hint. I hope you’re sitting down, because this might come as a shock: everyone else already knew that space doesn’t have air.
And because they knew that already, the smart people who work out $ amounts for speculative space missions explicitly count how many $ are needed so people can breathe. They work out the $ for the big tin cans full of air and CO2 scrubbers and beds and stuff. They work out the $ so the cans can be tested to make sure they work good. Then they work out how much more $$ it would take to shoot those big heavy cans into space.
They even work in some $ for engineering to take care of the pee and poo — it’s not easy in space kids! And also snack snacks, drink drinks, bath time, and even nap time for all the little boys and girls flying in the tin can.
And then when they’ve worked it aaaaalll out as best they can, they add up all the numbers and get a really big number at the end. Maybe trillions of dollars!
Do you know how much a trillion is? It is a number with a lot of zeros. Maybe it would be cheaper to replace those brave boys and girls with a cute little robot!
But… I wonder if the little robot will be able to do as many things or go as many places as those boys and girls. What if we have to send lots and lots of robots to get the same information. What if we each one needs to be special in order to do the hundreds of different complicated tasks clever boys and girls can do. What if the cute robots aren’t actually cheaper in the end?
Hmm. Well, that’s actually a very interesting and complex question, isn’t it? If only there were someone who could really cut to the heart of the issue and….blurt out for the 53rd time that space doesn’t have air and nobody has gone to Mars yet. That person would have a very “valid point”.
Well, there you go.
Had you written something like “Is going to Mars riskier than a drive to the store for ice cream? I speculate that it Sure is. Astronomically riskier. But I speculate so are the rewards. Both tangible and intangible. As with any other activity, it comes down to to weighing those speculations against known facts, in some cases on an individual basis.”
then you would have got a different response.
Oh please. Don’t be obtuse. Of course the exact risks faced by an astronaut on a Mars mission are, in your somewhat inaccurate parlance, “speculative”. It’s not like I claimed there that Mars was exactly 1294.6% more risky than going for ice cream or something — I used no numbers at all, and I think it was pretty clear that exact numbers were not part of the point. Sprinkling the verb “speculate” around like a lunatic with a sticky thesaurus wouldn’t have made anything any clearer.
I doubt I would have gotten a different response, because of course you’ve still managed to entirely evade the point.
The section you’re mangling there was (part) of my response to your claim that going to Mars was in the conveniently invented category of a “needless risk”, and therefore not worth doing. (Strange how you didn’t specify that you speculated that it was a needless risk. Almost like I could infer that it was a statement of your opinion all on my own…)
All I had to do was point out that many of the things we do — like drive out for ice cream — can also be classified as “needless risks”. Thus, plainly, a simplistic binary evaluation of “need” is not a sufficient way to evaluate what risks are worthwhile, and your arbitrary designation of something you don’t like to be a “needless risk” can’t serve as the thought terminating cliche you hoped it would.
You could not have been clearer that we don’t know how to do it and thus the destructive iteration, and you’ve also made it clear that we do want to do it.
I really do feel like I’m talking to a child here. You’re aware that we do in fact know how to send people into space, right?
And you understand that a test of a particular rocket design does not impinge on that fact, right? Like, they didn’t have all the knowledge of spaceflight packed onto the rocket that blew up? No, we don’t know how to do the particular (and very tricky) set of maneuvers they were trying to do. Yet. Hence the experiment. It’s to add to knowledge — not replace it because we’d lost it.
I mean, you also know that when they design a new car, one with a new kind of collapsible body panel or something, and it doesn’t do as well in the crash tests as they’d wanted it to, it doesn’t mean our species forgot how to move people around in powered vehicles, right?
(I just can’t even. I’m literally completely mystified as to what you’re trying to say with some of this. Like, with some of it I can at least tell what’s going on — the difference between unit costs and aggregate costs clearly doesn’t compute with you, and you’re unwilling to actually read for comprehension. But some of the rest of it… I just can’t even tell what’s going on.)
(Obligatory caveat: no, I don’t think cars and missions to Mars are comparable. It’s just an analogy about how new designs can be tested to add to knowledge, without calling into question all the previous knowledge up to that point.)
That it’s very very expensive to send crewed vehicles into space, because of our as-yet primitive technology. And that, if one wants to do space exploration, machines are the way to go.
Except it’s also very, very expensive to design and send robots into space, because of our as-yet primitive technology. In fact, in aggregate, they seem to be about an order of magnitude more expensive than manned missions for the same amount of scientific value. (Not even accounting for the fact that more involved exploration — deep drilling, microscopy, paleontological excavation, siting and positioning certain sensitive instruments, etc. — are either entirely beyond robotic capability, at least for the foreseeable future, or would even further heighten the cost difference.)
I don’t understand how this very simple point is so hard to grasp.
You actually quoted me (“would actually know the risks.”) in the context of noting that those risks are speculative, not actually known.
So. I figure that, once someone has gone to Mars (and hopefully returned) we will actually know those risks, and at the moment they can only be simulated.
ALL risks are inherently speculative. Risk is by definition the odds of something bad happening before you do something — like go on a plane trip, say. (Obligatory caveat: just an example, not a comparison to space travel.) Before you get on the plane, you can try to assess the risks — both the big ones, like crashing or losing an engine, and the smaller ones, like being airsick, sitting next to someone who takes their shoes off, or the catering being short on bloody mary mix.
But if you get on the flight and then land safely with none of that coming to pass, you can’t simply conclude the risks were all zero. The risks didn’t appreciably change. You just rolled the dice right and avoided the bad stuff.
(Now, there is also often uncertainty about risks. When something happens thousands or millions of times — like airplane flights — we can more confidently evaluate the risks. But its statistical, and its always subject to change — the risk of flying on a 737-max famously changed rather rapidly, for example. One trip to Mars — successful or not — won’t necessarily change the risk evaluation for an astronaut on the next one much.)
(What are the risks of fusion power plants compared to fission power plants?)
Physical risk? Depends on the fusion technology. In most cases, there’d be some danger from neutron radiation in the immediate vicinity of the reaction, and some induced radioactivity in material that’s in close proximity (such as tokomak linings). That would probably need to be disposed of, but the effect could also be used by baddies to enrich fission material for bombs. There might also be a lot of tritium around, which is nasty stuff and hard to deal with. Otherwise, thermal plants of similar size would have similar environmental impacts in terms of waste heat, water use etc. And I wouldn’t touch any high voltage wires in either type of plant. But fusion has at least zero risk of fission-style uncontrolled meltdown or anything similar, assuming the “power plant” we’re talking about isn’t just a fission triggered hydrogen bomb.
Economic risk? Too early to say. Probably at least more viable than fission, since it will be sexier, and the disaster potential is lower. But assuming it’s not a “Mr. Fusion” unit that runs on household garbage, commercial plants will still need huge investments and be facing the same ever stiffer competition from solar and wind.
(Except robot probes have done a shitload of exploration since then, without people)
Nope. On planetary surfaces, robotic probes have done a tiny amount of exploration. In terms of number of sites, area covered, samples collected, and a host of other measures, even the most modern Mars probes are still lagging behind this one weird manned program from the 60s whose primary purpose wasn’t even scientific.
You seriously imagined I thought you claimed travelling to Mars and going to the shop were the same thing?
Remarkable how hard your subconscious works to evade the issue at hand — again: travelling to Mars and going to the shop are categorically different in that one is a thing that exists and the other is not.
Yes. Yes I absolutely did. I still do. Because you keep conflating them together as if you think I’m comparing them — you literally do it in the second sentence right there, pointing out that they’re categorically different, in that one exists and one doesn’t, as if that was in any way relevant, either to the original analogy, or to the discussion in general.
(As an aside, the quote in question wasn’t about going to the shop, it was about airplane tickets — in an analogy about the frustrations of trying to have a discussion about a complex subject with a simpleton whose go to response is “DID YOU KNOW THAT’S COMPLEX?”. Not that it matters. If all you’re ever going to do is pluck out out a couple of words from an unrelated analogy and say “[word] is not like going to Mars”, getting the specific [word] wrong barely even registers — you already pegged the wrongness meter. You can make them up for all care.)
Anyway, I do think you thought I claimed that air travel and going to Mars were the same thing, because, well, let’s check the tape:
Here’s you @142:
That’s you comparing flying and going to Mars for, well, I’m sure some very good reason. Something presumably, you know, relevant. Because you certainly wouldn’t just say random stuff and hope nobody notices you’re not reading the full posts right?
Hmm. Well, it was (nominally) in response to, me @141:
I can really only assume you just stopped reading after the part you quoted. You clearly didn’t comprehend even that part. And the full piece was about trying to put your little non-sequitur shenanigans in a more familiar context to show you how absurd they are.
But, hey, let’s address your critique — flying is a thing, and travelling to Mars is not a thing yet. Sure. I mean, that wasn’t actually important to the analogy, but, let’s try it this way:
Get it?
I dunno. Is analogy blindness a thing? Maybe you should get it checked out.
Yup. Quite affordable, actually. Demonstrably so.
“Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion or 7.1 percent of GDP in 2022, reflecting a $2 trillion increase since 2020 due to government support from surging energy prices.”
(https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies)
So, the money is there, for sure. But, you know, priorities.
The future is unclear. The past and the present are not.
(https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2023/11/14/culture_influences_where_we_think_the_future_is_992576.html)
But you’re pretty sure it’s riskier than going to the shop for ice-cream.
FWIW, I concur.
But, thing is, I can go to the shop for ice-cream — going to Mars, that I can’t do.
Sure. So, you are suggesting that it may be needless, and it may be more expensive, and it may be riskier, and it might be still speculative, but it’s worth doing, but not because it’s needful.
I get it.
But not to Mars, right?
Only around circumlunar space.
I have repeated this so, so many times.
e.g. “Again: no people beyond the Earth-Moon system.”
Look: a nautical metaphor would be the difference between paddling in a raft in the shallows and travelling from Europe to America during the Neolithic period.
It’s not the absolute expense, it’s the relative expense.
Thus, robots are all that can be afforded.
So long as you keep imagining that crewed missions are in general cheaper and better than uncrewed missions, you will remain bewildered as to why (as I noted) no humans have gone beyond the Earth-Moon system.
(Must be perversity, eh?)
I’m talking about known risks of known technology versus speculative risks of speculative technology, not about outcomes when the technology is applied in the wild.
Um. Pick any one of the fusion power plants that are currently operating or have ever operated. That is a known technology, no?
(Oh, wait)
Good grief.
(The Martian was a movie)
BTW, and again:
“NASA’s Stardust was the first spacecraft to bring samples from a comet to Earth. After a five-year journey, the spacecraft flew within 155 miles (250 kilometers) of comet P/Wild 2 and collected samples of dust and volatiles from the comet’s coma. Enroute, it also collected samples of interstellar dust and flew by asteroid 5535 Annefrank. Stardust sealed its collected matter inside a sample reentry capsule, which separated from Stardust and landed in the Utah desert on Jan. 15, 2006. The main spacecraft was given an extended mission known as New Exploration of Tempel 1 (NExT) that included a flyby of Comet Tempel 1 (or 9P/Tempel). It flew within 112 miles (181 kilometers), of the comet on Feb. 15, 2011, returning 72 images.”
(Same citation as earlier)
Right. So you assert that you seriously imagine I thought you claimed travelling to Mars and going to the shop were the same thing.
Sure. Else, you could not even pretend to keep up the pretence.
Heh heh heh. Sure.
Not only is there much that you dunno, there is much you don’t know you dunno.
(Analogies, similes, allegories, metaphors, comparisons, allusions — oh my!)
—
Anyway, I did give you the glowing space-cadet piece by Brin, so there’s that.
(Lotsa exclamation marks!)
jack lecou@124,
Well currently, it’s infinitely difficult, i.e., impossible, anywhere beyond low earth orbit. And in that regard, we’ve gone backwards in the past half-century! While robotics, even if slower to advance than performance at the game of go, working out how proteins fold, or making up false claims and deepfake porn, has nonetheless made considerable progress – see for example these recent survey articles on locomotion and manipulation.
So we’re comparing actual costs with an estimate (produced by whom?). First, we know that the costs (and timescales) of novel and complex technological projects routinely balloon – even ones much less novel and complex than setting up an inhabited base on Mars. So I’d be inclined to multiply this estimate by ten at least. Second, there once again is the implicit assumption that the robots of a few decades hence won’t be far more capable than those available now.
I take this as an implicit admission that you can’t make a rational case! But I’m far from “coldly rational” with regard to space science – I love it, and hope (rather optimistically at 69) to live long enough to learn whether there is or has been life in or on Mars or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I don’t want the available resources wasted on ridiculous prestige projects that also risk human lives unnecessarily.
Are they? With lower launch costs, you can also send larger and hence more robust and capable robot probes. We’d need actual figures for this argument to bear any weight.
Or maybe they will turn out to be intractable. We simply don’t know.
I simply have no idea where you get that from.
You’re not comparing like with like, as I think you’d realise with a bit of thought. The figure you give for the entertainment industry is, presumably, either what is invested in it (by private companies, with the expectation of short-term profit) or what consumers choose to spend on it as individuals. The supposed cost for a Mars base (which as noted, I’m pretty sure would be far larger than the unsourced estimate you provide) would be, directly or indirectly, state spending, and would also require scarce resources of human scientific and technological expertise and skilled labour which would not then be available for other purposes. The same resources, used for robot-based space science and science and technology directly aimed at avoiding environmental catastrophe, would be incomparably more beneficial.
I focused here on the comment which directly addressed my argument. I’ll come back to read the subsequent exchanges.
jack lecou@141,
The fact that you have to misrepresent my argument so blatantly should tell you (and anyone else still reading) something. I won’t bother to quote anything more just now, but I’ll deal with two points:
1) You ignore just how robust and repairable/reconfigurable (by technical experts operating at distances of many million kilometers) robotic probes have turned out to be. hey routinely outlast their design lifeimes. The Voyager probes are still sending back valuable data decades after launch. Software upgrades to planetary rovers are sometimes key to missions.
2) You express scepticism about how military research will affect the development of planetary rovers. But both the entire space programme, and the miniaturisation of semiconductor technology, are largely byproducts of military requirements, much as we might dislike this. For the space programme, I need only mention a single name: Werner von Braun. For semiconductor technology, I strongly recommend Chris Miller’s Chip War. “Moore’s Law” is not a scientific law; the military wanted computers that could be fitted into missiles, but the same process of miniaturisation has generated the internet, online gaming, climate modelling, indeed the whole technological basis of modern life. And why do you think DARPA is DARPA?
KG @148: Well currently, it’s infinitely difficult, i.e., impossible, anywhere beyond low earth orbit. And in that regard, we’ve gone backwards in the past half-century!
That’s kind of a weird way of looking at it. I guess it works if your criteria is something simplistic like “can I buy a ticket to the Moon leaving next Tuesday?” But that won’t necessarily ever be the case. Meanwhile, what it means for it to be possible for a nation state, or humanity, to “go to the Moon” is somewhat different.
The “tickets” they buy obviously aren’t just seats (normally), but tens of billions of R&D and manufacturing capacity over the course of half a decade or more to build the “seats”. But I don’t really think you have any reason to think that buying that kind of ticket is “infinitely difficult” for those actors, or that they wouldn’t be successful if they try. We know it can be done technically, its just regular levels of “spend the money” difficult. In fact, that’s currently being done in the form of the SLS program, albeit in a manner somewhat hobbled by institutional constraints and Congressional politics. (Part of the reason the complementary/alternative program by SpaceX is moving more rapidly and inexpensively in many ways, although I think it could still do so without all the labor violations.)
The same is mostly true of a hypothetical Martian expedition. Obviously it’s true there’s never been one. (Thanks for informing me about that, BTW! I might have kept on thinking humans have landed on Mars if you guys hadn’t pointed it out! That sure would have been embarrassing!) But thanks to programs like the rovers and the ISS, we know a great deal about the problems that still need to be worked on to make something like that reasonably safe and successful — probably much more than we knew about sending humans to the Moon ca. 1961. And with the possible exception of radiation and low-g, none of those problems appear to require huge unknown breakthroughs to manage.
(To be clear though, and possibly despite appearances, I don’t actually have a huge hard-on for going to Mars any time soon. I think the smart move is to return to the Moon, with a firm commitment to permanent bases this time, as well as to expand access and infrastructure in Earth orbit. That will reduce costs even further and serve as a laboratory to refine the necessary capabilities for going further out with full confidence — if that’s possible, obviously. Mars — and other bodies — can follow naturally enough after that.)
While robotics, even if slower to advance than performance at the game of go, working out how proteins fold, or making up false claims and deepfake porn, has nonetheless made considerable progress – see for example these recent survey articles on locomotion and manipulation.
That’s fine so far as it goes. But I think you still understimate the scope of the problem, and the full impact of your solution. I think you need to think more specifically about what robotic-only exploration actually involves.
To start with, there are already some very sophisticated robotic operations. Go look up some videos of, say, an Audi electric motor factory. It’s amazing. Automated almost from start to finish. But emphasis on almost. There are always a few finicky final steps performed by humans. Nothing too difficult — conceptually, I’m sure a machine could be programmed for it. But it would take not only extra machines, but also some finicky programming and debugging, so it’s not really economic to try. Besides, even if all the production steps were automated, there would still be humans in that factory, acting as a kind of indispensable human-shaped glue to fill in all the little gaps. There will be humans behind the scenes replacing worn outtool bits, debugging a new machine motion, thumping work-holding pallets back into alignment, greasing joints, replacing frayed wire harnesses, or fixing hail damage on the roof. Even if you get it down to 1 guy for all the odd jobs, it’s actually a huge leap from an operation with even 1 guy to one with 0. Larger than the leap from 5,000 guys down to 1. No factory on Earth operates like that, or even plans to.
Robotic-only exploration is always 0 guys, by definition.
So think about what it would take to build a robot, or set of robots, that could, say, do deep core drilling under the Martian polar regions to explore for water, signs of life, or past climate conditions. Something like this. But with 0 guys.
I’m sure it could be done, in principle. But the machinery all needs to be about 1000 times more complicated than the machinery you could get away with if you had even just a couple of guys. For example, our deep core rig needs a big pile of drill sections that can be drawn from a storage rack and linked into place as the drill descends. With a robot, maybe that’s special rack designed to interface with some manipulator to withdraw the section. Fine — budget whatever N hundred man hours of design work, fabrication and testing are needed. So far, you’re probably ahead. It’s just a rack, in principle, it may be only slightly more complicated than what might be used for a partially manned rig.
But now, what if something doesn’t quite go right? It’s got to take a long, hazardous journey before it can fulfill its job. Maybe the rack takes a hard jolt somewhere along the way, and something gets bent slightly, jamming a section in place. Uh oh.
Now, if you have guys there, even just one or two, a few minor setbacks like that won’t be a big problem. A guy comes over, pokes and prods and feels around to see what’s going on, then maybe welds on an extra tab of metal somewhere for leverage, and bends things back to “good enough” using a pry bar or a portable jack.
With 0 guys, though, the difficulty expands exponentially. Right now, problems like that have to be proactively dealt with back on Earth, before the mission even starts. Basically, we have to be 100% sure that there won’t be any problems in the first place. Not just no major problems. NO problems. Period. That’s…actually really hard. It means the design and testing difficulty — and expense — expand by a couple orders of magnitude. N100 man hours. Or even N1000. Multiplied over every single part, motion, and operation.
This trap is why rover budgets tend to trend more and more expensive — not less as you might expect from technology advancement. You can keep costs down somewhat by simplifying mission goals, or re-using designs (Perseverance saved some bucks by borrowing a few parts from Curiosity), but that’s antithetical to exploring and doing new things. A new design for something like an unattended — not autonomous, unattended — deep drilling rover would entail quite a lot of complex goals and hardware. Launch won’t be a big deal — the usual few hundred million — but we might be talking about 10s of billions in development. Maybe 100s.
And that’s just the drilling mission. You need a completely different kind of $100 billion rover mission to perform a specialized excavation on a canyon wall. Or install seismograph stations. Or run hydrological experiments with bulk samples of soil. Etc. Basically, the rover strategy trades off the relatively fixed (albeit initially high) complexity of manned exploration (designs for safe ships, living spaces and EVA gear, and bulk lift capacity to launch it all) for the endlessly expanding complexity of bespoke rover designs. There’s obviously a point where these will cross over — and I don’t think it’s even that far down the road.
Now, I understand you have something different in mind, at least speculatively. The idea — and correct me if I’m wrong — would be to eventually combine technology like better robot ‘hands’ with deep-learning tech to create a class of more general purpose robot that could fill in these kind of troubleshooting and problem-solving gaps without additional front-loaded engineering expense. Something that would be capable of semi-autonomously diagnosing and unjamming that rack of drill sections, for example. All without purpose-built hardware, or (that much) custom software and remote control input. Afterward, maybe it could even operate the drill. Or retrieve a misplaced ice core. Similar models could be tasked with carefully digging a geode out of a cliff. Etc. Etc.
And all that with minimal new hardware design, or programming. We can assume there’d still be a need for some specialized equipment, of course, but nothing significantly more complex than equivalent equipment (drills, instruments, etc.) that would need to be furnished for a human expedition. (All of which could presumably be accelerated by additional design tools Earth-side — I’m sure we’re not too far away from “MechE-Gpt” that can take a prompt like “make me an adapter from this drill to this actuator arm that can function in vacuum and tolerate 500G of instaneous shock load” and then send a CAM program to a machining center or 3d printer.)
All of which sounds fantastic. In a good way. It may even be inevitable, eventually, assuming, as you say, that our technoculture doesn’t collapse in the interim.
The speculative aspect isn’t the problem. Nor the exact timeline we can predict for this. The problem is the idea that with that much power, humans would be less likely to want to go to space. I don’t think it follows.
I mean, all of this is making it easier, not harder, to go to space. Arguably, it’s making it relatively easier for machines to do everything — which I think is your logic. But in an absolute sense, it would soon be easier than ever for humans to go to, if they wish. Those high fixed price barriers would fall.
Machines with that combination of automation and adaptability would be able to plug in just about everywhere to revolutionize farming, mining, manufacturing, construction and service industries on Earth, and very possibly, start to make widespread industrial activity in space (mining, manufacturing, construction, tourism) economical as well. With the correct programming, something like that would literally be capable of self-replication. It would turn over the entire economy, basically. And there’s no reason “MechE-Gpt” wouldn’t be able to churn out designs for crew modules and space suits just as easily as robotic modules. Meanwhile, the robot explorers would be out there turning over every rock, finding resource deposits or other points of interest, and generally paving the way for humans to have a high degree of certainty about what they’d find when they get there.
It seems like you look at that situation and think “why would anybody want to?”, but I would gently suggest that that is just personal projection. Plenty share your sentiment, to be sure. But plenty of others would look at that scenario and think, “get me out there.”
You’re not comparing like with like, as I think you’d realise with a bit of thought. The figure you give for the entertainment industry is, presumably, either what is invested in it (by private companies, with the expectation of short-term profit) or what consumers choose to spend on it as individuals. The supposed cost for a Mars base (which as noted, I’m pretty sure would be far larger than the unsourced estimate you provide) would be, directly or indirectly, state spending, and would also require scarce resources of human scientific and technological expertise and skilled labour which would not then be available for other purposes.
I didn’t claim that it was like for like — merely that your assertion that nobody has to expend resources for someone to write a novel was false. Everything takes resources.
Skilled labor is no less monopolized when they’re compositing green screen footage for a Marvel movie then when they’re CAD designing a rocket thruster. The fuel used to fly a production crew or an automobile racing team around the world is just as expended as the fuel used to launch a SpaceX test (maybe more so, arguably, for a methane based engine). The “scarce resources” used to build a sound stage are just as used as the ones used to build a training tank or a Starship upper stage. (I guess you could argue that the material actually launched into (deep) space is lost permanently. But even at a few hundred thousand tons a year — which we are nowhere close to — that volume is absolutely insignificant compared to the amount of material wasted in other activities.)
So it really comes down to priorities — like I said, maybe yours are different from mine, maybe mine are different from everybody else’s. But don’t pretend that space exploration is somehow uniquely extravagant compared to other human activities. It really isn’t.
And why do you think DARPA is DARPA?
This is the kind of thing I’d anticipate from a renewed focus on autonomous military drones. Or this. Neither one is geared for unattended (i.e., changing batteries, replacing missiles, self-repair etc.) in any way.
Maybe they’ll pull your robot out of a hat, so to speak. Serendipitous discoveries have happened in DARPA-type projects before. I’m just saying, the problem spaces the military is interested in is simply not actually that proximate to the problem you want them to solve.
I notice these things:
“But I’m far from “coldly rational” with regard to space science – I love it, and hope (rather optimistically at 69) to live long enough to learn whether there is or has been life in or on Mars or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I don’t want the available resources wasted on ridiculous prestige projects that also risk human lives unnecessarily.”
vs
“It seems like you look at that situation and think “why would anybody want to?”, but I would gently suggest that that is just personal projection.”
—
What it seems to me is that KG wants to expedite the acquisition of space science. Nothing about whether or not people actually want to go there, but about pragmatically achieving the same results sooner rather than later.
The only personal projection I see, jack, is your inability to see that, though it would be nice and all to can the apes and send them to places afar, the same results could be got by sending machines. And have been.
Face it, humans are like the decoration on the cake, when it comes to physical space exploration.
Contrast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_spaceflights
(That’s worldwide)
vs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_uncrewed_NASA_missions
(That’s NASA)
The only personal projection I see, jack, is your inability to see that, though it would be nice and all to can the apes and send them to places afar, the same results could be got by sending machines. And have been.
There’s no point in writing back if you can’t read.
Contrast:
If the fallacy wasn’t convincing the first 27 times, try try again, I guess?
So. I can read. Evidently. Thus, I can quote you and even respond to you.
As I have.
Like, your Walter Mitty fantasy about space engineers grabbing drill parts from the store — how those drill parts or the drill or the store got there, how the habitat and the supplies and whatnot got there, that’s not relevant to you.
But that the drill bits can be replaced by plucky technician-engineer-pioneers, that’s the ticket. The, ahem, “deep core” ticket.
jack, you really want to play this game?
As you wish.
If the evasion wasn’t convincing the first 28 times, try try again, I guess.
So. I can read. Evidently. Thus, I can quote you and even respond to you.
As I have.
A parrot can quote things. The question is whether the responses are actually responsive or insightful. Yours aren’t.
Like, your Walter Mitty fantasy about space engineers grabbing drill parts from the store — how those drill parts or the drill or the store got there, how the habitat and the supplies and whatnot got there, that’s not relevant to you.
Like this, for example. I mean, what the actual f***? How do you think? They teleport?
They get there on rockets, you simpleton. The drill parts get there on rockets. The habitats get there on rockets. The engineers get there on rockets. Lots of rockets. It will be very expensive. Particularly if the rockets aren’t very good.
All of this is extremely relevant to me — that’s why tests of better rockets like Starship are so interesting.
How is all of that not obvious too you? Again, even a child can understand this.
Heh. You are, with a “straight face”, stating that I was not responsive.
The question is whether someone can apprehend and thus endeavour to comprehend my responses so that they can be aware of whether in their estimation they are actually responsive or insightful.
(Your reaction is perceptible)
Point being, you need far, far less than that if you skip the apes.
Regarding Mars (he writes, unresponsively):
How about, you know, getting there in the first place?
(Been done with robots)
And getting back safely.
(Not been done at all)
There’s a hoary old adage about learning to walk before trying to run.
Good grief!
Whatever makes you imagine I understand none of it and that I am somehow ignorant of circumstances?
It’s not personal, you know.
And hey, Musk did start SpaceX specifically to get people to Mars, beginning back in 2001.
You are most impressed with the achievements of SpaceX (which Elon has controlled since its founding by him) and fair enough, too.
I get it.
You want crewed space travel, and this is the quickest way there.
Others want space exploration and space science and lots of missions to lots of places without having to worry about getting the explorers back.
I mean, surely machines can take more risks than people, no?
…yours aren’t.
Exhibit B:
Like, is that supposed to be clever? What kind of idiotic point do you think you’re making?
Let’s check with the experts. For instance, here’s a little white paper from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission about regulating fusion power plants. It contains sentences like:
or
or
So please, please go ahead and send the NRC a trollish diatribe explaining to how there can’t possibly be any risks from fusion power plants because fusion power plants don’t exist yet. I’m sure they will be eager to receive this news. It will make their licensing duties — which is literally about assessing the risks of things that don’t exist yet — much simpler.
For your convenience, here’s their contact page.
Point being, you need far, far less than that if you skip the apes
Given that I have acknowledged this from the very beginning, how, exactly, is that a point?
Has it occurred to you that maybe you are missing something?
Almost. It’s supposed to be understandable by anyone sufficiently clever; say, about average. Not exactly obscure.
A speculative technology, much as that for taking people to Mars.
(“Is analogy blindness a thing?”)
The very point was that it’s speculative. Like, you know, sending people to Mars.
It follows that the experts expertise is in a currently non-existent technology.
It was, in short, a parallel example of an as yet non-existent technology, but as far as you are concerned, it was nonsensical. A “non sequitur”, you wrote.
Your lack of apprehension and your subsequent response are already evident.
The question has served its purpose.
How is it not?
What is it you imagine I am missing? Care to specify?
I do know your general thesis is that, whatever it may be, humans are better. And never mind the reality and the history of space exploration.
Or is what I’m supposedly supposed to speculate might be missing that your thesis is otherwise? Maybe it’s stronger, as in humans can do it, machines never could.
(We’ll see how responsive you are)
It was, in short, a parallel example of an as yet non-existent technology, but as far as you are concerned, it was nonsensical. A “non sequitur”, you wrote.
Yes. Indeed. A parallel example that quite neatly hammers the final nail into this entire sad non-sequitur of a “point” you’ve been making.
Because speculative though it all may be, it should be crystal clear that it is perfectly cromulent — at least out here in the real world — to write about the risks of non-existent technologies, the costs of non-existent technologies, the benefits of non-existent technologies, and to compare all of those things to both existing technologies and even other non-existent technologies. (Also, [gasp], to do so in normal language, without explicitly mentioning that they are non-existent or speculative in every single sentence.)
We do this out here in the real world, because sometimes it behooves us to make a good faith assessment of the non-existent technologies in order to determine whether the non-existent technologies are worth pursuing into existence or not. (Possibly you have a better solution to that problem there in your world. It might be interesting to hear about it.)
II do know your general thesis is that, whatever it may be, humans are better. And never mind the reality and the history of space exploration.
Nope.
Or is what I’m supposedly supposed to speculate might be missing that your thesis is otherwise? Maybe it’s stronger, as in humans can do it, machines never could.
Slightly warmer, maybe, but still missing big pieces. Nope.
(We’ll see how responsive you are)
I think I’ve spammed at least 10,000 words up thread by now about that very thing, nobody needs more than that. It’s not even a particularly difficult point. Just go and read for comprehension this time.
BTW, I don’t even contend that it’s an inarguable point. It definitely is. For example, KG makes a good argument about the likely future of robotic technology. But it necessarily acknowledges my point about the present of robotic technology. (And, in the end, KG’s argument is perhaps too good — it just needs to be carried to it’s logical conclusion.)
So coy! I ask you what it is I don’t comprehend, you tell me to read for comprehension.
I reckon I have, I reckon I have properly adumtrated your thesis, and I think you’re retreating into bluster.
That’s what I think.
—
Meanwhile, in the real world:
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/upcoming.html
So coy! I ask you what it is I don’t comprehend, you tell me to read for comprehension.
What is restating it for the 45th time going to do? It’s pretty clear you and I do not speak the same language.
Why don’t you try reading the little paper I linked @146. It’s making (basically) the same point, but is written by someone else — maybe their writing style will be more compatible with your particular brain chemistry or something.
!
Regarding Mars (he writes, unresponsively):
How about, you know, getting there in the first place?
(Been done with robots)
And getting back safely.
(Not been done at all)
The paper is all good and well and I’m sure exceedingly expert, but in our reality, our timeline, robots are the ones going to Mars and doing all the exploring.
(As if going to the Moon and going to Mars were somehow comparable; did you not notice the parable of the raft?)
Meanwhile, in the real world:
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/upcoming.html
So weird.
I suppose I could link to a schedule of upcoming Insane Clown Posse tour dates or something. Just as relevant to the discussion.
Right.
So, the NASA Official list of upcoming missions, from their own website, last Updated on 08 November 2023 is totally irrelevant to the discussion.
So far as you are concerned.
“Upcoming Planetary Events and Missions
All launch dates should be considered “No Earlier Than” dates, as launches can be delayed for many reasons from their planned times.”
Surely it could not be because none of them are crewed missions, in this timeline.
Why would NASA not want the advantage of crewed missions?
Hey, did you ever read Bill, the Galactic Hero</abbr??
“Bill soon finds himself pressed into naval service, under the instruction of Fuse Tender Sixth Class Tembo, a kindly but eccentric religious man. Bill learns the brutal trade of fuse replacement, a mindless, dangerous, but necessary task during combat.”
(Just as relevant to the discussion. :) )
[just to show I’m not a space-Grinch]
Back in the day, I read speculation about a method for making travel to Mars viable; basically, multiple craft (at least 3) put into orbit between Mars and Earth (a bit like Elon’s Tesla) simultaneously. Basically, the more of them, the quicker the trip will be, because the trip involves hitching a ride at one end and getting off at the other, and the more often one will reach a terminal of the loop.
Obs, a much bigger initial investment, but once going, after that all those craft would need is reaction mass and thruster maintenance.
Hitch a ride to Mars, hitch a ride back home.
The paper is all good and well and I’m sure exceedingly expert, but in our reality, our timeline, robots are the ones going to Mars and doing all the exploring.
Indeed? If humans aren’t making policy anymore, I suppose I should go talk to the robots. They’d probably be better conversationalists…
totally irrelevant to the discussion.
So far as you are concerned.
What could possibly be the relevance?
Why would NASA not want the advantage of crewed missions?
Sigh. Because they can’t afford it. I think we’ve covered this.
(At least until recently. They are trying again these days. Somewhat weighed down by the SLS boondoggle — I think the earliest Moon flight has been pushed back to at least 2027. A cynic might observe that NASA’s actual goals as an institution don’t necessarily always match the loftier ideals on the letterhead.)
I don’t think you could be any more desperate in your bluster.
But sure, I believe you believe that if (as is indisputable — cf. also ESA) n our reality, our timeline, robots are the ones going to Mars and doing all the exploring, it must mean that humans aren’t making policy anymore.
(Could not possibly mean that those who plan and fund and execute those missions believe they can achieve more with robots than with humans, right?
Maybe they’ve never read that paper from 2012)
Selective quoting, eh? Let me fix that:
The relevance that every single planned and almost every single past mission is uncrewed in respect to the discussion of why send apes up in cans, with the intent to bring them back still alive?
(Quite mysterious, I’m sure. Nothing to do with NASA’s expertise, right? ;) )
Well, yes. Not affordable, not practical, not doable.
(Whereas what we are currently doing is evidently affordable, practical, and doable — else it would not be being done)
And so might a realist.
Thus, your admiration of what Elon has done with SpaceX, right?
Back in the day, I read speculation about a method for making travel to Mars viable; basically, multiple craft (at least 3) put into orbit between Mars and Earth (a bit like Elon’s Tesla) simultaneously. Basically, the more of them, the quicker the trip will be, because the trip involves hitching a ride at one end and getting off at the other, and the more often one will reach a terminal of the loop.
It’s sometimes called an Aldrin cycler. Yes, that Aldrin.
I suppose everything is “speculation” to you in this area, but I’d put it a notch or two higher myself. There’s nothing speculative about the math, after all. And the safety and economics are pretty straightforward as well — it’d almost be wasteful to do anything else, assuming you were actually planning repeated trips. The cycler transfers are generally a little longer than the quickest (aerobraked) Hohmann transfers. But a cycler station only has to be put into orbit once, so you can afford to build it with more comfort and shielding. After that, smaller quicker vehicles could be used to transfer crew on and off.
(It is slightly more complicated than “the more of them the quicker the trip” — there are different cycles to choose from, with different tradeoffs for frequency, number of vehicles, and transfer time. I think Aldrin’s preferred plan called for two, catching both ends of a single 2 year Earth/Mars synodic period, with travel time per leg being a bit over 5 months.)
The relevance that every single planned and almost every single past mission is uncrewed in respect to the discussion of why send apes up in cans, with the intent to bring them back still alive?
Do you think it’s news to me? Do you think I don’t already know? If I was going to be impressed with NASA’s judgement, or thought NASA always did the optimal thing, why do you think I would I be arguing for a different course of action?
(Quite mysterious, I’m sure. Nothing to do with NASA’s expertise, right? ;) )
No, very little to do with NASA’s expertise. Everything to do with their budgetary limitations and institutional priorities.
Well, yes. Not affordable, not practical, not doable.
Not affordable by NASA, at least not a big push. As for not practical or doable, that has yet to be demonstrated. Certainly by you.
(Whereas what we are currently doing is evidently affordable, practical, and doable — else it would not be being done)
Up to a point. The low hanging fruit are always the easiest to pick.
But while I’ve no doubt we could afford to keep sending hyper-sophisticated RC cars every few years indefinitely, the returns will be rapidly diminishing science-wise. And doing anything much more complicated will rapidly start to push the limits of “affordable”, at least in its current definition.
I’d be surprised if this outlook didn’t factor into NASA’s slooooow turning of the ship back toward a more balanced approach to manned flight with SLS/Orion.
Thus, your admiration of what Elon has done with SpaceX, right?
Well, I think only a fool would begrudge SpaceX their due. Their accomplishments are undeniable — reusable first stages, and their rockets will be launching about 80% of the payload for the entire planet this year. They are literally a decade or more ahead of every other space agency or rocket firm in the country. A fully successful Starship launch would probably make it three decades.
But I wouldn’t admire Elon if he paid me to. His history — and current behavior — suggest that’s probably not the correct place to put the credit anyway. So I guess I’d say all of the people at SpaceX except for Musk deserve that admiration — including Gwynne Shotwell, I suppose, though I don’t credit executives much. I think that success has far less to do with leadership, and a lot more to do with people just being really excited to get to work on proper rockets.
…every other space agency or rocket firm in the country should be in the world.
(Also, meant to mention: the fact that SpaceX is so far ahead is impressive, but it’s also a concern. Even if Musk weren’t nominally at the helm. I think we might want to start doing something about their growing monopoly on launch services. But preferably without killing what is clearly an R&D golden goose.)
Speaking of SpaceX though, here’s a puzzle:
By almost every measure — cost, reliability, launch cadence — Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy is superior to every other launch platform on the planet. Sometimes by miles. It’s even man-rated. And unlike a mission to Mars, it is a thing that exists. It can clearly be done.
So if NASA is so smart — and compared to SpaceX, has far more resources — why didn’t they go ahead and build a platform like that first? Why were all their rockets — recent ones anyway — comparatively more expensive (far more expensive), slower, and less safe?
(And if they could be wrong about that, what makes you so sure there’s not also something wrong with that launch schedule you keep linking to?)
I suppose it’s gauche to quote onseself – but in light of Morales’ endless trolling this seems a relatively minor character flaw.
But perhaps Morales with his wealth of experience knows better about the utility of “apes” than an actual space scientist who has dedicated his career to robotic exploration of space.
!
I’m pointing to it because that’s what it is. Reality.
I’m noting there are zero (none at all) crewed missions in the pipeline.
—
Anyway. Let us bask in the glory of
Musk’sSpaceX’s vision:(https://www.spacex.com/human-spaceflight/mars/)
—
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/science/elon-musk-spacex-starship-mars.html)
Oh dear — an uncrewed landing! Tsk.
Ah, it took a while, but the SlimySlug made it here.
That would make no difference either way.
The actual space scientist who has dedicated his career to robotic exploration of space clearly thinks robotic exploration of space is the way to go, given our current technology, despite what he claims.
(Look at what they do, don’t just listen to what they say, that’s the go)
Ah, right, the boring old trolling by the SpewGargler.
The specimen who finds it amusing to misnyme me, at the cost of being likewise misnymed.
(Equitable, that’s me, Bubbulus)
So, SpoogyGob, be aware of the simple fact that whether or not someone else can dispute it does not alter the fact of whether StevoR can dispute it, whatever “it” may be. Independent things, you see.
(Logic is tricky for the WheezyBuba)
Morales has now posted roughly one quarter of all comments in this thread.
So while this may seem completely off-topic, in fact it is not.
Words to the wise.
Nah, I’ll keep feeding you, ______bob.
A tradition here, from the old days.
You pop into threads to have a go at me, I get to retort.
I like it.
Thus it has been for years now, and thus it shall be.
(Got anything to say about the topic at hand, troll? Come on, now)
jack lecou@125,
A valid point, which I didn’t acknowledge. I don’t think that would tip the balance of advantage once robots are sufficiently capable, because they don’t need any air, food, spacesuits, etc., and much less in the way of protection, but it’s certainly a relevant consideration.
jack lecou@146,
I’ve now read the 2012 article you linked to. I’m unimpressed. Partly it’s simply outdated: since it was published, robotic probes have returned samples from a comet and two asteroids – but it’s odd that the 2010 successful sample return from asteroid 25143 Itokawa by the Hayabusa probe isn’t mentioned. Whatever, with the recent return of samples from 101955 Bennu there are now five extraterrestrial bodies from which samples have been returned – and for four of these, only robotic probes have returned them. OSIRIS-REx spent several months in Bennu’s vicinity while the sample site was selected. Crawford claims that human exploration produces 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more scientific value per unit time – but of course this is only of any relevance when it concerns places people have gone – i.e., the moon (and low-earth orbit, although the paper focuses on planetary surfaces). I know you, and he, want to extend this to places people could possibly go – but since there isn’t, yet, anything more than speculation about how the hazards of radiation and micro- and low-gravity could be dealt with, that’s not something I’m ready to concede. At least we know robots can reach and land on pretty much anything with a solid surface, and there don’t appear to be any fundamental problems in sample return from almost any such place. I think you would agree that people are not going to be visiting the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in much less than a couple of centuries.
Most of Crawford’s comparisons appear set up to favour human exploration. The sample-return comparison from the moon compares the Apollo missions with three Soviet robotic probes, the last sent in 1976. It’s remarkable that no-one has even attempted sample return from the moon since then, but there’s surely no doubt that far more could now be done robotically than was achieved in the 1970s. Again, Crawford compares the distances travelled by the Apollo 17 astronauts on the moon and the Opportunity rover on Mars – almost the same distance but taking 3 days for the astronauts, 8 years for the rover. But of course astronauts have travelled precisely 0 km on Mars. And again the datedness of Crawford’s paper shows: the successful use of the Ingenuity robotic helicopter opens up huge possibilities for future Mars missions involving the integration of multiple probes and three spatial scales of exploration: orbital, aerial and overland. Cheaper launch costs should permit sending multiple probes to work in concert. And Nasa is currently working on the Dragonfly helicopter for use on Titan.
Crawford also cites studies on earth, comparing humans “suitably encumbered in a spacesuit” with (remote-controlled) robots. But of course the spacesuit is only only of the “encumbrances” an astronaut faces on the moon or (if they could get there) Mars. They need to deal with differences in gravity and sensory input, they need a base where they can eat, drink, sleep, wash, deposit bodily waste (I understand they could piss and shit in the spacesuit, but they still need to dispose of the result), and of course if the spacesuit fails, they are in immediate danger of death, which is not the case in the earthbound studies. Moreover, while it’s true, as Crawford says, that tele-robotics cannot be employed from Earth to Mars, all his comparisons and references to robot-human comparisons are from 15-20 years ago.
Finally, Crawford notes that the Apollo programme was carried out primarily for geopolitical motives, with the science bolted on and thus not having to bear the full costs a science-led programme would. He suggests that future science could also benefit in this way. With regard to the moon, he’s almost certainly right. But the geopolitical advantages of a base on Mars are difficult to see once one considers opportunity costs. And there is another side to piggy-backing on political (or personal) prestige projects: the Apollo programme was curtailed immediately after Apollo 17, the first mission on which an actual scientist (the geologist Harrison Schmitt) was included in the crew. Of course, pure science missions (if there is such a thing) can also be delayed or cancelled due to costs (the plan for returning robotically-gathered samples from Mars has just been put on indefinite hold by Nasa, due to the Republican attempts to sabotage the US economy); but if your science is just an add-on, it can easily be taken away, and even if it is not, it has to fit in with the real goals of the programme.
Incidentally, I don’t think you’ve yet provided a source for the $2tn cost of establishing a Mars base. Excuse me if I’ve missed it somewhere in your extended spat with John Morales.
jack lecou@150,
No, it isn’t. It’s 0 guys on site. That’s very different. I’ve already pointed out that remote software upgrades have been essential to robotic missions. So, for that matter, have been work-arounds for hardware problems such as misdirected antennae or physically stuck parts of a probe. Clearly, new pieces of physical kit cannot be manufactured on site, but the same is largely true for missions involving people. Some improvisation is possible, as in the example you gave of Apollo 13 – but note that the urgency there was down to the fact that the astronauts lives were in danger. In the case of a robotic probe, you can usually take the time you need, and if you eventually fail, well, it’s disappointing, but no-one’s dead.
That’s pretty close to part of what I envisage, except for the last two words. There is absolutely no reason to rule out as much programming as is needed done and installed remotely, and as I’ve already noted, that is already done. But the other point is that people are going to need specialised hardware designed and built on Earth in order to do many of the tasks (deep drilling etc.) you mention. You can’t improvise up a drill capable of getting through Europa’s ice layer from a pack of general purpose hand-tools. The other thing I envisage is extensive use of reconfigurable swarms of sub-robots, including both specialised and non-specialised components. (I was amused to find, nearly 30 years ago when I took up a position as a university lecturer in computer science, that my robotics-focused colleagues were building their machines out of Lego!)
I’d like to finish this comment by noting what I think we agree on.
1) There will (short-term catastrophe excluded) be lunar bases inhabited by people within the relatively near future (my guess would be some time in the 2040s).
2) There will not (you might insert a “probably”) be any human travel to Mars for at least a few decades (I’d say, almost certainly none before 2100, quite likely none ever, if we limit this to more-or-less unmodified humans).
3) Aside possibly from Earth-crossing asteroids, there will be no human travel to any extraterrestrial bodies other than the moon, Mars and its satellites at least until well into the 22nd century.
jack lecou@150, 151
A couple of points I didn’t respond to @185:
#150
This is a nice irony: one of the main defences of spending on space science and technology, and perhaps particularly on that involving sending people off-earth, is the “spinoff” argument – that although the “problem spaces” are quite different, solutions to terrestrial problems will emerge from it. There’s even some truth in it, although overblown in my view. But we already have clear examples of military-pushed R&D producing fundamental advances in computing and allied technologies – see for example Ch. 14 of Chris Miller’s Chip War: “The Pentagon’s Offset Strategy”:
Work on increasing the sensory, motor and learning capabilities of military robots will inevitably produce benefits for space-exploration robots – the only question will be how far the military allow knowledge of the advances they achieve to filter through. (My hunch, FWIW, is that the revelation of how far US foreign policy has come to depend on Elon Musk’s supposedly purely civil-oriented and commercial Starlink network, and how far his SpaceX threatens to gain an unassailable lead in launch technology, along with growing competition with China, will result in a significant reversal of the tendency to outsource both space and computing (including robotics) research to the private sector.) But aside from this, I dispute your claim that the “problem spaces” are not “proximate to the problem you want them to solve”. Robots which can operate for long periods without communicating with their base are an obvious military advantage – any communication risks interception. Specialised resupply and repair robots which can mean most robots can stay out in the field while only the resupply-repair robot needs to return to base are another. So are robots with built-in redundancies, so that damage to some parts need not mean a complete loss of function. Advances in all these areas would have obvious applications in space robots. And of course, if there are moon bases, it would be naive to think that the miltary would not be concerned with how to defend friendly bases and attack hostile ones – inevitably using robots.
#151
If your point is “merely… Everything takes resources”, it’s a pretty feeble one. The point is what resources, where they come from, what else could be done with those resources, and who decides. The skilled labour (and more so, the expertise) involved in designing and building technology for extraterrestrial use (whether involving people or not) is very different from that involved in compositing green screen footage for a Marvel movie. Human-using and robotic space programmes are in direct competition for limited resources, and both are in competition with other claims on state spending.
*Perry and Marshall both worked for the Pentagon. Perry had worked for a Silicon Valley company, Sylvania, specialising in military contracts.
**GPS started out as a purely military requirement. The network of atomic clocks in satellites is now so central to the operation of the economy and industrial society that its failure would cause a financial crash far greater than that of 2008.
jack lecou,
It might be worth mentioning that I was much enthused by Gerard O’Neill’s The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space when it came out in 1976. It was subsequent progress in robotic space exploration, and computing, and lack of progress in human extraterrestrial activities, that led to this enthusiasm waning. Of course that doesn’t mean: “So I was wrong then and am right now”, but it does indicate that my current view is not the result of inflexibility.
I’ll get back to individual replies when I get a chance, but I think it might be helpful to step back and make a more detailed outline of what I’m actually trying to say, so we can target it a bit better and not waste time with spurious arguments.
First, my argument is NOT:
IMO, that was all at least implicit in everything I’ve written so far, and often stated in explicit caveats. But it’s clear from some of the replies (not only Morales’) that it wasn’t quite clear, and we’ve been wasting a lot of time making (or replying to) arguments that are, as far as I’m concerned, obvious or entirely irrelevant. I’ve numbered these “phantom” points for future reference.
If you’re confused about why I think I can argue that human exploration would be cheaper without arguing (or even completely believing) that it’s actually possible, the answer is right there in the word would. It’s a straightforward conditional argument. Engaging with the argument I’m making requires taking at least the possibility of human exploration as given, ad arguendo.
Making a conditional argument in this way isn’t “cheating” or something. We do it all the time when we say things like “single payer would be a cheaper way to deliver health care in the US”.
Someone might reply to that by saying, “we don’t even know if it is possible to get the US Congress to pass such a thing”. And they’d be technically correct – but they also wouldn’t be engaging with the argument. They’d just be shifting the topic to something else – politics. And while it’s true the economic effects won’t happen unless a bill passes, it’d be pretty obtuse to argue that no one is allowed to talk about the hypothetical economic effects until it actually passes. This kind of response is not only evasive, it’s also a bit patronizing: it’s extremely unlikely that someone interested in a discussion of health care policy needs the obviously dire political realities pointed out to them.
(To reiterate: there’d be something very circular about that kind of objection. For one thing, you can’t actually find out if Congress would pass such a bill, or if it will actually be cheaper, unless you try. And such attempts would be more likely to succeed if you can make convincing conditional arguments like, “this bill might save money [if you pass it]”. Which I hope also illustrates what the point of exploring these kinds of conjectures in the first place is.)
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With that out of the way, what is the argument I’m making?
What it comes down to is an observation about the economic constituents of the two kinds of exploration, and how that impacts their scaling characteristics, in what I think is a largely under-appreciated way. Specifically, it matters a great deal whether something is a mostly fixed cost (which only has to be paid once), or a variable cost (which will need to be paid every time, for every participant/task/mission).
As many here have been very keen to point out, it’s a fact that human exploration has huge variable costs: humans need things like heavily shielded ships, habitats, spacesuits, and lots of consumables (air, food, water, fuel, etc.). Robots require…none of that, really. A small rocket and a little fuel to get launched on their way and then…nothing.
So, obviously robots are cheaper, right? Every fragile, clingy human you send needs a continuous supply of all this stuff, launched into space at exorbitant expense. While robots are stoic men of steel and titanium who need nothing.
Well, not so fast. The tricky part is that, for robot missions, R&D is actually a variable cost. Because it’s effectively paid per robot. And, despite everyone pretending otherwise, that R&D is not particularly cheap. The going price for a new Mars rover mission is currently at least $2 billion – or about ⅙ of a USS Gerald Ford.
It’s true that, in principle, you could mass produce and send up 2,000 more mostly identical Perseverance rovers, say, for a fraction of the cost of the first one. But in practice, that isn’t done. Partly that’s because there’d still be significant operating costs (for the Earth-side control and support team), but even ignoring that, the problem is that there just wouldn’t be that much new science that way. While a few extra copies sent to a few different sites might be worth it, the returns on more identical rovers diminish fairly rapidly. To get new science, we (currently) need to design an (almost) entirely new rover each time, along with new instruments, experiments, and capabilities.
What’s more, the $2 billion rovers we have today are still just picking the low hanging fruit. I don’t want to underplay their sophistication – they are extremely impressive, and there are good reasons that they cost $2 billion to develop – but nevertheless, at this point, they are still little more than big RC cars with a few sensors bolted on. We’ve only recently reached the stage of having a simple drill to peck at rocks, or set of canisters to scoop loose material (from a place the rover is able to go) for pickup by a future return mission, price TBD.
Although we’ll take the $2B price for the rest of this, it’s actually reasonable to expect that development price to go up, perhaps significantly, as increasingly complex and extensive exploration capabilities are required (surface to orbit sample return stages, sample collection in more difficult to reach places, delicate excavations, deep drilling, exploring caves or other rugged terrain, conducting in-situ experiments on bulk martian materials, etc., etc., etc.). In order to completely explore Mars (whatever that might mean to you), there’s really no way to tell how many robot designs will be needed, or how extensive – read: expensive – the capabilities of the last robot will need to be*.
Meanwhile, human R&D costs are almost entirely fixed. It’s true that to go to Mars we will need to develop a lot of new (or new-to-this-generation) things: heavy launch platforms, ships, refueling capabilities, habitat modules, space suits, improved air and water recycling equipment, etc. Each of those items may take some $100s of millions, even $billions to develop. But (assuming they eventually work – which we are for the sake of this argument) we only need to spend that amount once. Every astronaut and mission henceforth would be able to use that same kind of ship or suit. (More or less. Incremental fixes and upgrades might be expected, but at a correspondingly incremental R&D cost. It’s even likely many parts of the designs will be useful on planets or bodies beyond Mars.)
And while it’s true that human Martian exploration will require some specialized research equipment as well (I mentioned drilling equipment, e.g.), that equipment would typically need to be much less specialized — and over-engineered — than it would be if intended to be used entirely by a robot and successfully deployed without any chance of human assistance. (This is true even for autonomous or highly automated equipment.) Meaning development costs that are orders of magnitude lower, for the same capability — and the same or lower mass cost, as well. In many cases, regular old Earth-style tools and equipment could be used, either as-is or with only very straightforward modifications (lightened to save mass, modified controls for use in a space suit, adapted for better heat dissipation, dust sealing, etc.).
Certainly, the Apollo astronauts used many perfectly recognizable Earth tools and instruments, including rock hammers, bolt cutters and cameras. Excepting some purpose-build scientific instruments, the most specialized piece of equipment used on the Moon was probably the LRV. And despite all the unique requirements, that was ultimately developed for about the same R&D cost as a new model of regular car – it’s just that only 4 were produced, instead of 4 million. (If the Moon program had continued to Apollo 18 and beyond, that fixed cost could have been amortized much further.)
Indeed, whether rock hammers or vehicles, most equipment would also be much more re-usable than robot rovers are (currently), which moves a significant portion of the expense of the actual built and/or launched artifacts into the fixed cost column. That includes much of the infrastructure costs of an ongoing human expedition: space stations, fuel depots, cycler stations, surface habitat modules, power generators, ISRU modules, etc. only need to be put into place once. Re-usable boosters and upper stages can also be, well, re-used, at least for a time.
Which means the consumables (and the astronauts themselves) are really the only fully variable cost of human exploration. What’s more, at any point in time, even that cost is a ceiling rather than a floor. The bulk of the expense there will always be the launch costs, so the variable cost portion of manned-exploration (and by extension, the overall long-term cost) falls disproportionately quickly as launch platforms become more reliable and re-usable**, as recycling equipment becomes more efficient, and as parts become incrementally more reliable (or as experience reveals which ones already are). Not to mention the future potential for in-situ resource extraction to eliminate the need for launches of some consumables altogether (at least air, water, food and fuel all being candidates).
To put numbers to this (which to be clear I don’t necessarily think is a good idea at this point in history, but is probably necessary to ground this discussion on some level), we’ll have to turn to the last resort of scoundrels: the back of the envelope calculation.
First, for rovers, let’s figure a cost of $2B, spread over a 10 year mission, for $200M / year.
For humans, it’s a little more complicated. Let’s assume a mission tour on Mars is 6 months travel each way, with 18 months on the surface. For consumables, let’s say we need 120 tons of water per year (at a 98% recovery rate***), 2 tons of food, .75 tons of oxygen (at a 50% recovery rate), and 1 ton of “miscellaneous” per person, for a total of 5.775 tons/year. Round up to 6, and an 80kg astronaut can be a rounding error. We’ll also budget 4 tons of fuel to ascend 150kg back from the surface to Mars orbit.
About 6 months of that (3 tons) needs to go from Earth surface to Mars orbit, then 9+4 tons all the way to Mars surface. The last 3 tons of return trip supplies need to go from Earth to Mars orbit and back, but not all the way to the Martian surface. At gear ratios from LEO of 3, 7.4, and 15.2 respectively (and assuming I haven’t flubbed this somewhere – please do check me, it’s painfully easy to misread something and be out by two orders of magnitude with this kind of thing) that’s a total of 150.8 tons of supplies needed in LEO. Since this all results in 18 astronaut-months on the surface, let’s pro-rate it to an almost-round 100.5 LEO tons as the per-year figure.
This makes it just a question of Earth-LEO launch costs. The math isn’t even very hard. We get a range of costs for the care and feeding of a fragile human on Mars for a year of:
– STS/SLS/Atlas V @ ~$20K/kg => $2 billion
– Falcon 9 @$1500/kg => $150 million
– Starship (projected) @$100/kg => $10 million
– Starship (optimistic)/some other future gen platform @$10/kg => $1 million
Now, obviously that top line is crazy. Manned exploration is an absolute fool’s errand at SLS prices. But that changes pretty quick. Remember, a rover is ~$200M/year, so even the current Falcon 9 launch costs result in a favorable comparison. That’s before making any corrections for the relative productivity of rovers and humans.
And the bottom line is also a bit crazy, in a good way. At the optimistic end of the spectrum, a worker on Mars may only cost a small multiple of what a well-paid worker on Earth costs. Even with extremely advanced reusable rover tech, it might be very hard to get development costs for a 10 year mission to under $100 million (compare with the Starship-driven human program), let alone down to $10 million (for “Starship Advanced”). Just the programming team might be more than that. (And again: it’s extremely hard to argue that, even hampered by space suits and an alien environment, humans won’t be at least a couple times more effective than robots.)
ISRU for fuel, water and oxygen – which is an admittedly speculative technology, but is definitely being planned for – could further cut these costs by at least another 40%. (And that’s just Mars ISRU – I assume more elaborate schemes where, say, lunar-sourced fuel is used for the outbound leg, could save even more.) Even more could be saved by the combination of ISRU and longer duration stays (if that’s acceptable safety-wise).
Now, I can already hear the objections to this. And some of it is a fair cop. I absolutely have swept a metric shit ton of development cost under the rug, as well as a fair amount of “fixed overhead” like the weight of transfer vehicles, Mars base equipment and structures, and initial supplies of water and air. All of that is probably well into the $100s of billions, and amortizing it in, especially over a short time frame, will certainly make the comparison less favorable. (Though I think the development costs are the more significant part — at Starship rates, even launching masses of equipment is not exorbitantly expensive.)
What I would reply is that this structural difference between fixed and variable cost does really matter still. It’s important to factor in the fact that (most of) the development costs in particular will likely eventually be paid by someone, for some reason. A good percentage of the necessary capability would be developed in the course of simply going back to the Moon, for example. And once the capabilities have been developed, for national dick-swinging purposes or otherwise, science and exploration will be able to free-ride again, and make hybrid research missions look extremely attractive financially.
In sum, there is metaphorically a very steep wall on our way to manned exploration. That wall looks intimidating to climb (perhaps more intimidating than the endless stair-step slope of rover development), but that wall is also slowly shrinking. It’s only a matter of time until someone scales it. And once scaled, the landscape on the other side should be much flatter.
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* I do concede that KG proposes a way to escape this trap, in the form of some future kind of general purpose robot, moving some rover R&D costs more to the fixed side of the equation. It might work, but it’s not the way rovers are done today – not the “proven” strategy purportedly able to replace human participation in space exploration. Moreover, if such a thing ever becomes available, it would have implications way beyond just better rovers — and depending on launch costs, might really only serve to bring them back up to parity in any case.
** Again, SpaceX’s goal for Starship is airline-like operations where, to a first-order approximation, the cost of a trip is the cost of the fuel. That would put kilo-to-LEO costs in the $tens(!!!), as opposed to the $tens of thousands for systems like STS or SLS. A three order drop. Current Texas fireworks drama and excessively-optimistic Ogruf. Musk timelines aside, SpaceX’s track record means I’m not sure I’d be prepared to bet against that in even the medium-ish term.
*** Recovery rates based on proven technology in use on the ISS.
jack, a most excellent response.
Unless you want, I shall desist from responding, but I do want you to know I am duly impressed.
(Obs, no need to respond. And, PS, I know I come on a bit strong)
jack,
I have a lot to say in response to your #187, but it might be best to wait until you’ve responded to my #184-#186. Let me know if you’d rather I responded to #187 first.
Gotta say I didn’t expect this thread to still be going now!
@ 118. Rob Grigjanis : “StevoR @117: I think the primary meaning for modern Russian KOCMOC (cosmos) is ‘space’, not ‘universe’.
Ah, okay. I did think it ws a reference to the Cosmos in the wider , um, cosmic /universe-al sense but could well be mistaken.Thanks.
@142. John Morales : “Flying is a thing. Travelling to Mars is not a thing. Never been done yet.”
There was a long time when flying hadn’t been done yet either. At least not safely, successfully and over long distances. Then people invented first balloons then aircraft and it was done. Just becuase people haven’t yet done X does NOT mean it cannot been done. merely that we haven’t done it yet.
I grew up in a world where humans walking on the Moon happened before I was born. But most people throughout Human history – not that lucky. I hope to see humans walk on Mars before I leave this world, well die bluntly. I may or may not be that lucky but I do think it will hopefully happen. Among many other things that have been predicted in Science Fiction, quite often dismissed as impossible dreams and yet happened. Computers with access to nearly all the worlds knowledge in your pocket anyone? Computers that weren’t huge limited rooms fullof clunky vaccuum tube machinery thehn and now we have better machines in our microwave ovens or fridges or cars with more power than once used to fly Apollo to the Moon and back. Not just one but many space telescopes incl the latest one in IR and the Hubble?
@121. John Morales : Thanks for the link but Musk doinga PR exercise visiting Kfar Aza kibbutz and buddying up to Netanyahu, don’t exactly make up for the whole enabling & promoting actual nazis and spreading conspiracy theories &
disinfooutright lies for me. As far as I’ve heard Musk hasn’t apologised and seen what he’s done wrong there and is still doing it and thus being actively evil.@177 & 178. jack lecou :
&
Clearly what SpaceX is doing works. At least some of it in some ways that have led them to being remarkably successful and leading the way.
Now if we can just take what works from them and their approach and still succeed whilst taking out the bad aspects -the abuse of workers and scientists, the dumb safety errors like thinking they could get away without fire suppression on the launch pad, etc..
If SpaceX can blaze the way – as it is clearly doing – then others can learn from it and then improve on it I’d say. Of course, if it were that easy everyone would already be doing it and it’s also true that NASA has helped fund and work with SpaceX so, again, its not just either / or here but others can and, seems to me, would be well-advised to learn from how SpaceX have suceeeded and their positive example. Plus also learn from what they’ve got wrong too..
KG @186,
Interesting. I’m sure that disillusionment is common, unfortunately. That might be one of the worst crimes of the 45-year exercise in disappointment, lowered expectations and sunk cost fallacies that some people still euphemistically call the “Space Shuttle Program” (among other failures of the space program through that era*).
That said, I don’t know that “lack of progress” is an entirely fair assessment. We did (eventually) build a continuously inhabited space station, after all, and a lot of good work has been done there over the years, even if it wasn’t as flashy as new planetary landings. The science from there will be critical in informing next steps out to the Moon and beyond.
It’s interesting that you’d perceive this as a “lack of progress in human activities”, though. After all, robotic exploration had also had a 20 year lull at that point. The space station didn’t launch until ’98, true, but Pathfinder/Sojourner landed only a year earlier — the first successful landing on Mars since 1976. Everything was moving pretty slow until then. (If the lull in Mars landings was a person, it would have been old enough to drink. That’s better than the lull in Moon landings, which is starting to get mailers from the AARP at this point, but still a very long time.)
Unlike you, I guess I see all of this as pretty clearly a bureaucratic and/or leadership failure, not some inherent aspect of the technologies. It’s not as if human exploration ever actually hit some technological wall, not any more than robotic exploration — it just wasn’t being invested in very actively, or intelligently.
Indeed, in retrospect, it’s very clear NASA had not been investing very wisely in either type of program for a very long time. By the mid to late 90s, after two decades of exorbitantly expensive shuttle operations and Freedom being stuck in an endless cycle of redesign hell, I think it was becoming a real crisis for them. The Mars rovers are doing their part to advance science, no doubt, but I wonder if the even more important function as far as NASA is concerned is to be able to put a new one into the pipeline every 2 to 4 years, and deliver regular hits of “new rover just dropped” endorphins to the public without (entirely) breaking their yearly budget. (In many ways, I think the ISS program might ultimately prove more important, but it’s a slower burn.)
We talked up thread about how the civilian space program was left a bit rudderless after all the missile guys got what they wanted. That’s probably part of it, but I suspect it would take a much better bureaucratic anthropologist than I am to figure out everything that went wrong along the way. (…And is still going wrong. That link is a NASA official saying – just this year – that he basically thinks it’s better for NASA to get nothing done while burning up lots of unnecessary $billions.)
KG @184,
I believe that’s because he is focusing specifically on planetary surfaces, which do have somewhat different characteristics than exploration of smaller bodies, or remote observation. The difficulties in landing and so forth mean these are qualitatively very different kinds of things: obviously, at one extreme, not even the most rabid man-has-always guy is saying that something like a Juno or Mars Climate Orbiter ought to be manned. Simple sample return missions to small bodies fall somewhere in the middle.
But, I emphasize simple because I think this is a problem you continue to elide. For example, the Hyabusa probes are excellent pieces of work (especially given their budget), and they’ve brought us back good info — certainly a lot more about the bodies they’ve visited than we knew before. But they are very much still picking low hanging fruit.
Hyabusa2 (the more successful of the two) brought back less than 6 grams of material. 6 paperclips. Up until November 2020, all the robotic sample return missions in the entire Solar System had collected only slightly more than half a kilo of material (Chang’e 5 finally boosted this over 2kg – more on that below).
And more important than quantity is how that material is collected. Material on 162173 Ryugu appears to be surprisingly young, and there’s intriguing photographic evidence from the surface that show multiple types of rock and so forth, so it will be interesting to figure out how it’s put together. But the kind of sample collection being done by these probes doesn’t really allow for cataloging exactly where sample pieces come from, or doing careful stratigraphy, etc. Hyabusa2 took a subsurface sample, sure: by essentially blasting the surface with an RPG warhead first, and dredging up some of the gravel from the crater. Ultimately, we will definitely still learn a lot from it, but it will also take a lot of work to sort it out — there’s a joke here about doing archaeology with hand grenades.
So, low hanging fruit. And by that I’m not saying you couldn’t do more extensive and systematic sample collection with a probe. Just that you’ll have to pay to develop that probe. And it will probably be a lot more complex and expensive than Hyabusa was. That’s the part you need to be thinking about: the next probe. Always the next probe. (You can’t really skip steps either. For the most part, as things work now, it’s necessary to incrementally gather data in order to inform the bespoke design of each subsequent probe that might take it a step further – you typically can’t justify spending 50 million developing a core drilling experiment if you’re not sure there’s even a suitable place to drill.)
“Type 2” Phantom. I agree with you. With enough time, and probes, and money, you could probably get just about anything done.
The interesting question is how many probes, and how much money — and in the end would that actually be cheaper than doing what humans can do using humans?
I think the answer is kind of staring you in the face: there was largely no point in just sending a probe for more samples. The Apollo landings collected literally hundreds of kilograms of samples. And they did it in a comprehensive, organized way, from multiple sites, in multiple ways. To do something the manned missions hadn’t already done in their few days on the Moon would have required more sophisticated rovers than we have even today.
The only reason to send a probe without major new capabilities might be to explore a sufficiently interesting region that wasn’t surveyed by an Apollo crew. And that gets you your missing sample return attempts: the recent Chang’e series, especially #5. IIUC, a big part of the scientific justification there was to visit a geologically interesting (…and resource rich) area that no one had touched before. (But obviously national prestige is playing a big part too.)
That’s petty, and probably a “Type 1” Phantom: obviously going to Mars is difficult and has yet to be done. Assuming they do manage to get there, though, do you actually have any reason to think that hypothetical astronauts on Mars wouldn’t have the same relative success as real ones did on the Moon?
I think what Ingenuity does is better described as scouting rather than exploring – not counting the avionics and a camera, it doesn’t even have any instruments.
But that’s a quibble – it’s obviously a useful function if there are other explorers (of whatever kind) to follow up, and obviously there are already plans to use larger helicopters to ferry samples, or perhaps collect from hard to reach areas.
As to working in concert, that comes down to the heart of the argument, doesn’t it? If multiple probes working in concert is good, how much better is multiple probes working in concert together with human explorers? Drones can do drone things, humans can do human things, and above all, most of the drones only need to be drones, not $multi billion self-deploying, self-supporting, self-repairing, self-contained miracles of technology.
I’m not sure how the need to go back to base for the night, or to take a shit, undermines the findings from those studies in the slightest. The findings are for up to a 2 order of magnitude productivity advantage. If I am 50 to 100 times faster than you (or more), I can take awfully long lunch and toilet breaks before I have to worry about you catching up. Keep in mind that much of the human activity would be indoors: e.g., collect a core sample, go back and do chemical tests in the lab, repeat.
Besides, I doubt those studies are taking into account robotic down time either. In real life, rovers can go weeks waiting for commands, while new programs or routes are planned out and painstakingly tested on the rovers’ Earth-side twins.
I don’t think “differences in gravity and sensory input” or “danger of death” make up the difference. Again, the humans we’ve actually sent into this situation did pretty well, despite the difficulties. Sometimes the “realness” actually enhances performance. But if it did slow them down a bit, is it [checks notes] 100 times? Obviously not.
If it helps, here’s a clip from Samantha Cristoforetti about ”being scared” as an astronaut. I would add that other professions deal with this to some degree too – under sea welders, for example. There are always people who simply aren’t suited to some jobs but, in general, people are pretty good at adjusting to an awful lot of weirdness and background danger and still getting on with the work. Particularly after training and experience, and assuring themselves of the appropriate precautions.
(One thing you didn’t mention, that I would take seriously, is a radical loss of function due to radiation and zero-g effects. The practicality of all this does hinge on that being manageable – that astronauts would be functional, if perhaps not fully functional, when they arrive. Or after a reasonable period of recuperation. That’s all currently a big unknown, IIUC – indeed this is what I’m most pessimistic about. But if their capacities are only somewhat reduced, or some time needs to be sliced out for recuperation, I’ll just say it again: two orders of magnitude.)
You can’t take away what’s already been spent. If you can trick somebody else into paying for the R&D, you can still keep building off those blueprints for a lot cheaper, forever. Post-Apollo NASA inherited all kinds of stuff that way. The only trick they missed was inheriting a launch platform that was actually cheap enough to use.
Finding good cost estimates is hard. I don’t even know if there’s recent official material on this – all the stuff I can seem to find is Obama era stuff, and much of that is unofficial.
If you google “2 trillion mars mission” you get this editorial, which was where I took that figure from. I was looking for the highest possible number I could find, so I couldn’t be accused of downplaying it.
There are other estimates that are much lower, though. Zubrin’s “Mars Direct” plan estimate comes to maybe about $50 billion in modern money.
And here’s a NASA paper from 2016 that circles the cost estimate problem from a few different angles, including surveying some of the other estimates. They land on “half a trillion”, or about the cost of the F35 program. Their figure for life support is $2B for 3 years, which, depending on the # of crew (they don’t specify AFAICT), is approximately consistent with my argument above about variable costs. (Overall, it’s interesting reading. And an interesting head space to inhabit. I do have some concerns that the techniques they’re using to back in to the estimate tend to implicitly bake in very high numbers by relying on programs like the disastrously expensive shuttle – both launch and R&D – as a primary reference point. On the one hand, I suppose if that’s a model NASA continues to use, that’s also an accurate way to estimate – we can expect similarly disastrous failures and cost overruns in the future. On the other hand, maybe they should stop f**ng doing things that way. It would be interesting to see what the result would be if programs like Falcon or Starship were used as a baseline here instead – not just for launch services, but for R&D budgeting top to bottom.)
Yes. But 0 guys on site is what makes it expensive.
Audi could have 1000 smart guys in a big control room in Hamburg. But that’s going to do them exactly 0 good if a pipe bursts at a 0-guy factory in Hungary – at least not if they didn’t invest in a pipe-fixing robot beforehand.
So they’d need a pipe fixing robot. And that’s the part that makes it hard: all the hundreds of different kinds of [blank] fixing robot you have to anticipate and invest in. And/or all the different “unburstable” piping systems and un[blankable] [blank] systems you have to design and test. Typically, that can be expected to balloon complexity orders of magnitude above the cost of the factory itself.
And while it’s true that Earth-side programmers have, on occasion, managed to wiggle certain things loose on probes when all else looked lost, I would observe that 1) obviously there are pretty immediate limits to that, and 2) those “fixes” only worked because the robots had been over-engineered – at significant expense – with so much durability and redundancy in the first place that the problem was mitigated down to a level where a software workaround was possible.
What’s more, I guarantee you that each of those (near) failures spawned an extra set of requirements for the next set of rovers, so nothing like that would happen again.
Call me up when dead simple autonomous drones built down to a budget can perform the same feats.
Well, I think ‘largely’ is doing a lot of work there, but leaving that to the side, it’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the different design requirements you can use when something needs to deploy and function perfectly, vs. the ones you can use if there’s someone around to whale away with a hammer for a bit if things do happen to get badly stuck. That’s what I was getting at with the example of a rack of tubes getting jammed.
Because the difference in difficulty between making something with a 1% acceptable failure rate and a 0.0001% acceptable failure rate isn’t “<1%”. It’s several orders of magnitude.
The urgency is kind of orthogonal to the point. There are similar examples all over the space program. Apollo 17 jury-rigged a wheel fender for their LRV using a plastic-covered chart and some clips. Nobody’s life was in danger, and it took just a few minutes of problem solving to keep on going with the mission. That dust-worn chart is still in a museum somewhere.
If that had been a unattended rover, it’d be crippled. Or rather, if it had been a rover, it would have been engineered to within a tenth-millimeter of its life, cost at least another $900 million to develop, and never been broken in the first place. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t need to be, and it worked fine. And that’s the point.
(To be clear, I’m not talking about having such an easy-going attitude with everything. On life-critical gear, I’d of course expect a high degree of certified reliability and redundancy. And everything will need to be pretty reliable to earn its way. But, there’s no reason to go overboard with less critical pieces of kit. It’s ok to have, say a 1% risk that something non-critical might get beat up a bit in the landing – or during use – as long as it could still be usable again once someone tightens the bolts down. That’s just normal life everywhere that humans are available, including extreme places like nuclear submarines or antarctic bases.)
No, there has to be a limit to the amount of programming needed. Even an infinitely physically adaptable robot is going to lose to human astronauts sooner or later if it requires giga-years of programming time to perform a complex task.
And as the complexity of tasks and number of variables increase, the programming time could easily expand geometrically without some new tech to counter it. For instance, I’m sure you know it’s common to test out commands with twinned rovers on Earth for anything remotely tricky.
But imagine trying to program a rover to repair a badly bent strut on some other piece of equipment. First, you’ll need to find a copy of that equipment, and figure out how to replicate the damage in exactly the same way, with as close to possible the same degree of internal fatigue, etc. So multiple copies, since you need to try every possible variable, and then copies of those, since the program probably won’t work right on the first try.
Humans don’t have any particular problems with those kinds of tasks. We can literally feel our way to success. But programming a (dumb-ish) robot for that is an absolute nightmare. It’d be possible, just, but it’d take an ungodly amount of time (and test resources) to program and validate the solution for the one try you will get once you upload it to Mars.
And now imagine that the problem isn’t merely some damaged landing strut, but the once–in-a-millenium find of some weird Martian trilobite fossil we want to safely extract from an excavation trench or a cliff face…
No, to actually replace humans in the long term, you need a robot that can be completely trusted to expertly perform complex tasks like that, in an out outcome-oriented way, without elaborately pre-validating their actions Earth-side.
And for that, or even anything close to it, we would absolutely need some big breakthroughs in areas like sensing/anticipating physical material responses, and acting autonomously on them to accomplish a general goal. It needn’t quite rise to the level of sci-fi robots that can accept a general voice command like “hey robot, bend that straight again please”, but the difference is mostly cosmetic. The ultimate implications would be tantamount to the same thing – model a desired physical outcome, model a path to that outcome, monitor progress, achieve it with a high degree of success on the first try. And it would be enormously disruptive.
That’s certainly not the expectation, or the point. See above. (Especially not on Europa – that ice is thic [sic].)
That said, I’d expect anything larger than a touch-and-go lander to have way more than just “hand tools”. Something like a Mars base should have some real shop tools, albeit compact versions, as well as the obligatory 3d metal printer stuff and even supplies of materials like tubing, for repairs or temporary scaffolding or the like. It wouldn’t take that much to work up a passable drill rig from that if you really needed to.
(Of course, you can take that idea too far. I’ve been on exactly the opposite side of this argument with some Muskrat weirdos who thought that dropping down a couple of guys and a hobby metal lathe would be a sufficient set of conditions to bootstrap a fully independent Martian civilization before the food ran out….)
Sure. That’d help a lot with the issues of overdesign and redundancy if nothing else. But the programming challenge remains. And once you solve that, well, this isn’t making it any easier to believe you’re not effectively talking about primitive replicators.
I can get on board with most of that. I think we might have a small difference of opinion about just how thin the wall is between a return to the Moon (at least in a “real” way) and then at least a landing attempt on Mars.
But, as you’re alluding to, that’s provided it turns out problems like radiation are manageable and humans can traverse that expense in a halfway functional state without our brains and bones and etc. melting entirely. If they aren’t, even 2100 might be optimistic. (But it’s back to thin walls if/when the radiation problem is solved somehow: I think Ceres and the asteroid belt would be on the menu relatively quickly, even the Jovian system. The remaining difficulty would mostly just be a matter of delta-V, and by then I would anticipate either ISRU helping with the fuel question to some degree, and/or one of the various advanced high-specific-impulse schemes reaching a practical state for bulk supplies, humans, or both.)
KG @185,
There’s no irony, really.
It’s one thing to say, “Investing in space research might also produce unrelated spinoffs – who knows, maybe something we come across will lead to a cure for cancer.”
It’d be an entirely different thing to say, “A cure for cancer should be along any day now – those space boys are investing a lot of money in a new moon lander program.”
I’m not saying military drones and Mars rovers are quite as different as that, but the point stands, I think.
Anything’s possible. All I’m saying is that several people have said “look at how much the military is investing in drones” as if that was immediately applicable to advancing rover capabilities. It’s not, particularly. Investing in better video games physics and home assistants is at least as likely to lead to breakthroughs.
Operating for long periods without communicating is not a particular problem for Mars rovers.
I’m not aware that this is something anyone is working on. Particularly not …and repair, which would be a thing that’s actually proximate.
Redundancy isn’t a problem for military drones any more than it’s a problem for rovers: simply add the required level of survivability/redundancy to the design spec document and prepare to pay the bill for it at the end.
Now, a technology to somehow produce redundant designs without adding any design cost would be interesting, and somewhat revolutionary, but that’s not really a primary concern for military planners or their budgets.
A depressing possibility. But at a high level, a drone for attacking a moon base doesn’t operate on substantially different principles from one for attacking a Russian armored column – just swap the jet engine for a thruster pack and upload target recognition data for the Moon tanks. Basic guidance algorithms are not, AFAICT, the main difficulty in rover design.
And that’s a pretty feeble defense of your original point, which was “writing novels doesn’t take resources”. Obviously, everything does. It’s just a question of priorities.
As for human and robotic space programmes being in “direct” competition for, say, the same engineers, that’s a zero sum fallacy. At least on the time scales we’re interested in. The larger total investments in space exploration required to actually push humans over the wall will draw people into the field, instead of, say, computer animation or investment banking. Possibly to the point of having a glut. Particularly if there’s some inspiring progress made.
StevoR@191,
Well, replicating it might be another story, but I don’t think there’s any great mystery there. It’s been touched on a couple of ways up thread. Part of it is, abuse aside, I suspect people there are simply excited and motivated to be working on the problem. Only part of it though. The real “secret sauce” brings us completely full circle: it’s the fact that SpaceX never really has a “failed” test.
Basically, there are two ways to solve a really hard problem:
– Draw up a spec, enter into a massive cost-plus contract for ($billions) with an established aerospace firm, and then wait 25 years for an expensive, conservative solution that will work the first time you try it.
– Toss the ball to a few teams of smart engineers, let them brainstorm for a few weeks, and then find a way to incrementally test whatever idea seems to be the wildest. Or, better, half a dozen of them at once.
Nobody will ever call you an idiot if you follow the first approach. (Well, I might, but your bosses at [big space agency] won’t, and that’s what matters.)
If you follow the second approach, you’re probably going to have a lot of spectacular “failures”. But you’ll learn something from each one. You’ll learn about which pieces did work, and how to remix them with some new pieces — or some pieces left off! — to try again. Until it does work.
Just a brief note at this point: you shouldn’t use quotation marks to attribute something to someone unless they’ve actually said or written it. I did not write “writing novels doesn’t take resources”. I said:
Which is quite different, and true.
No. It is not different, or true. “Novels and furniture” here is not a novel, or a dining chair. It is a metaphor for the entire “frivolous” creative output of humanity (specifically the part they might stubbornly continue to do even when robots can).
And that takes a lot of resources. Trillions is an underestimate.
I did not say, or imply, that “writing novels doesn’t take resources”, and pretending that I did by putting those words in quote-marks is simply dishonest. And I included the condition:
Now that does require huge investment, and indeed I made that clear by continuing:
No resources beyond what are needed to ensure that people can continue to live (and live better) on the one planet that provides air we can breathe, water we can drink, shielding from radiation, etc. are necessary for people to go on writing novels and making furniture if that’s what they choose to do. This is emphatically not the case for either human or robotic space exploration of the kinds we’ve been discussing.
I am truly astonished, and disappointed, that you cannot admit the principle of discussion and debate that the use of quote-marks should be avoided unless you are quoting the exact words used. That’s just elementary intellectual honesty.
[KG, that would be a fair enough usage were it acknowledged to be intended as a paraphrase rather than a quotation]
John Morales@199,
Yes, in that case I’d dispute the validity of the paraphrase (as in fact I did @195 and 197), but the discussion could continue. I actually expected jack to acknowledge that no, those were not my words and should not have been presented as though they were, rather than simply doubling down.
It’s a perfectly accurate paraphrase, which is what the scare quotes are there to indicate. Quotes are in blocks or italics.
The distinction that I only now see you are trying to make, of an “investment to achieve a capability that didn’t exist before” vs. “investment to continue to do something that is already done” is one without a difference.
Whether you are spending $1 trillion on rocket ships or $1 trillion on (metaphorical) typewriter ink and Japanese chisel sets, they are both investments of resources.
If the environment collapses and a $1 trillion investment is required to even bring humanity back to the point where people could even start to write books, make furniture, or work on going to space again, that’d just bring the total to $2 trillion for both classes of activity — you’d still need buy typewriter ribbons or rocket ships once civilization was restored.
No, it isn’t, and those are not “scare-quotes”, which are not used to indicate a paraphrase:
However, since you appear to have used quote marks from ignorance rather than dishonesty, I’ll proceed.
As I already pointed out @148:
and@185:
jack lecou@201
That’s a very peculiar thing to say, since you’ve just pointed out a significant difference! But it’s not the only or even the main one I was talking about – see the self-quotes in #202.
As I said:
To live (and live better) people certainly need some way of writing (in the broad sense of recording thoughts in some durable medium), and of making furniture. They do not need space exploration, although we agree it is a good in itself.
If “the environment collapses”, both the dollar and social mechanisms for investment will go with it, even if the human species survives.
…And I think the context was clear enough.
KG @202,
You’re selectively quoting there.
If you want to do this, let’s rewind all the way. It started here:
The scenario there is a hypothetical future where robots are incomparably better at space travel, sure. But they’re better at everything else too. The point being made is that everything we superfluous flesh-based dilettantes do is effectively an idiosyncratic hobby in that world, so why not space travel too.
The reply to this was:
Which was, to my mind, basically unresponsive. If both space travel and novel writing are hobbies, and both consume resources (as we have now established to be obvious), why would specifically, “the bulk of [the resources used for space]” be singled out as better applied to something else (however worthy that something else), and not all the other hobbies’ resources too? That seemed like purely a matter of personal opinion. I assume you’re not going around bullying cosplayers or hot-tent campers about their choice of recreation, after all.
I now see there was a further fallacious dimension to this as well: that somehow investing $1 in something that hasn’t been done before is a special “investment plus“, whereas the exact same amount invested to pursue something that is more mundane is just “baseline”, “status quo”, “normal”. Presumably, by this rather novel argument, if the modern movie industry didn’t already exist, it would be plainly and fundamentally immoral to invest the trillions it would take to create it from scratch. Those resources would be better applied to make sure people can “continue to live (and live better) on the one planet we have”.
But I didn’t pick up on that at the time. What I picked up on at the time was the implication in there that the amount in question was somehow a hugely disproportionate amount of money for a diversion. It is very large, certainly, and possibly unprecedented as a hobby, but it’s not particularly huge in the scheme of things. So I begin my next reply by clarifying that people do indeed spend broadly comparable amounts of money [resources] on diversions in general, at least an order of magnitude more than we’re talking about here:
I went on to acknowledge that opinions can differ about how to allocate resources, but those opinions are off-topic, and nobody needs to be convinced here:
To which you replied as follows:
Which is, in the main, not even wrong. Spending is spending. There’s a muddled attempt at justification there: mentions of private companies, short term profits, consumers, etc., mixed in with simple unconnected facts (that it would be state spending, that resources would be re-allocated). Ultimately this is just word salad that falls very flat: yes, resources are allocated and reallocated to different things, by different processes. But it’s not somehow more moral or legitimate to allocate resources to desired activities via consumption and short term profit than via a democratic policy process. (If anything, I think I’d probably rather make the case for the latter.)
I shouldn’t even need to say anything about that last sentence, which appears to be trying to sneak robot based space science and environmental technology into the same virtuous and “incomparably beneficial” box — without any actual argument. (Why is robot space science there rather than, say, human space science…or blockbuster movies? Presumably, the argument would be that it is more valuable and effective, but in the context of the larger discussion, that’s just assuming the consequent. Moreover, relative to repairing or preventing environmental catastrophe, all are luxuries.)
My original reply largely skirted over these flaws, and the increasing degree of digression, and opted to clarify the apparent confusion about what resource allocation means:
And, again, I re-iterated that I thought we should treat the question of “worthwhile” as largely a matter of opinion here. Recall that in the context of this particular chain of discussion, everything is a hobby:
And that brings us almost up to date:
“What resources and where they come from and what else could be done with them” is, basically, just another way of saying “resources”. Those are always the questions we’re asking (or answering) when we talk about resources, or moving resources to one programme or another. Activity A take resources, yes. Activity B takes resources, yes. We need to decide where to put those resources, yes. Agreed. So what is your point?
Like I said before, the intimation of any conflict here in the (most relevant) medium term or beyond is a zero sum fallacy. A finite pool of engineers isn’t necessarily a finite pool of resources. Re-deployment can in and of itself make resources more effective. (Consider how silly a Boeing executive would sound complaining about SpaceX taking a chunk out of the talent pool so now nothing happens in the launch industry anymore.)
That’s without mention of the fact that new graduates arrive literally every year, with choices of field and specializations still nascent. (Consider how silly, well, just about any kind of science or technology company executive would sound in the 1960s complaining that there’s an oncoming national crisis because the Apollo program has sucked up all the engineering talent.)
But, more fundamentally, let’s grant that there is a conflict, at least in the (very) short term. Well, so what? That’s what resource allocation is all about, isn’t it? And the mere fact that two programmes might be in direct conflict doesn’t mean one automatically has the claim. Not even the one that is the status quo. That’s a question for policy to answer. Pointing out that both use the same resources is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
Finally, I think it’s interesting to go back and look at our journey so far: we start in a world where (by supposition) robotic resources are so plentiful that every human activity is effectively an optional hobby. With a flash of the cape, we move back from that world, into a more dystopian one where such things are frivolities, and the only moral use of scarce resources is to forestall the imminent threat of environmental catastrophe. Then, without stopping, we fly to one where the most moral allocations of resources are made via consumption, where human skills are once again scarce resources, and where the environment and robotic exploration are implicitly virtuous, but human exploration is not. From there, with only one more short hop, we land here on this world, where robots are in short supply and require the exclusive assistance of a finite pool of precious human engineers.
What a trip.
KG @203,
Again, a distinction without a difference. “Investment to achieve a capability that didn’t exist before” could mean “buy into a kickstarter for a new kind of colored pencil”. That is not so fundamentally different from a “regular” color pencil purchase that you were morally obligated to have donated the amount to Greenpeace instead.
I can see no other difference, unless you mean the difference is that “writing novels doesn’t directly compete for resources the programme I prefer uses, and the other thing does”. Which… surely not.
In the scenario, robots make the furniture for people. Robots can record things for people — and even write stories for them. Robots can go to space for people.
In our world, much the same. It’s true that recording things in some fashion is a prerequisite of civilization, but writing a piece of fiction on an antique typewriter is not. For furniture, there is Ikea.
All the “needs” are met there either way. Writing and making furniture and going into space ourselves are all part of the live better.
@ 205 jack lecou
There’s an Arthur C Clarke quote from a collection of his essays I had as a boy, but cannot for the life of me find with my best Google-fu. But paraphrased it goes, “Now that we’ve invented robots to compose music for us, perhaps we can invent robots to listen to it for us, thus saving us the trouble”.
You’ll just have to take my word for it he said that (although obviously much more fluently than my kludgy paraphrase). Anyway, I take the sarcastic point he was making to be obvious.
Silentbob @206:
I was thinking that there might be a good short story in there somewhere. Something about a future where ships flit about the stars, full of all the usual “Captains” and “Chief Engineers”, and whatnot — but the only title any of the human crew ever hold is “Poet”. Maybe a more hopeful counterpoint to Bester’s Disappearing Act.
Silentbob@206, jack lecou@207,
If you haven’t read Stanisław Lem’s The Cyberiad, you should. Both thought-provoking and very funny.
jack lecou@204,205,
You haven’t said anything new here, so I’ll leave others (if there are any reading) to decide who has the better case on whether there’s a significant difference between the (additional and limited) resources necessary to permit novel writing (etc.) on the one hand and space exploration on the other, and return to the substantive question of whether robotic or human space exploration is a better use of whatever resources are available for space exploration as a whole.
jack lecou@192,
There were multiple landings on Venus during that period: Soviet Veneras 11-14 and Vegas 1-2, Nasa’s Pioneer Venus 2 (mainly aimed at atmospheric investigation, but one component continued transmitting from the surface).
And why are only landings allowed to count? In the period 1976-1998 we had:
* Orbiters of Venus, Nasa’s Pioneer Venus 1 and Magellan, Soviet Venera 15 and 16.
* Voyager 1: launched 1977, flybys of Jupiter and its moons Amalthea, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto (1979), flybys of Saturn and its moons Titan, Tethys, Mimas, Enceladus, Rhea and Hyperion (1980).
* Voyager 2: launched 1977, flybys of Jupiter (1979), Saturn (1981), Uranus (1985) and Neptune (1989)
* Galileo: launched 1989, flyby of Venus 1990, insertion into Jupiter orbit 1995, primary mission (observations of Jupiter, particularly its magnetosphere, and its moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, and the most etailed images of Thebe, Metis, Amalthea, and Adrastea; secondary mission (begun in December 1997, continuing into 1999) detailed observations of Europa, plus others of Jupiter itself, Io, Callisto)
* Cassini-Huygens launched 1997, its first flyby of Venus took place April 1998, the second Venus flyby and extensive observations of Saturn and Titan were later, but obviously had been planned over years before launch.
That’s a peculiar sort of “lull”. More later.
KG @208:
Yes, if you broaden it to any planet, Vega 2 in 1985 would have been the most recent. That’s still almost a decade and a half before Pathfinder.
However, I don’t think Venus is particularly relevant. Venus is a particularly extreme environment, and at present no one is arguing that a manned landing on Venus is anywhere near feasible. Even robots find the conditions difficult — no landers have lasted much more than an hour or so. (AFAIK, there are no definite plans for any further landings, pending development of some fairly specialized and exotic technology — ultra-high temp semiconductor tech, or clever clockwork electro-mechanical systems.)
We’re only talking about planetary landings, specifically of the Moon and Mars, because that’s obviously the subject of the discussion. You’re more than welcome to argue that robots are best suited to flybys of Jupiter, but nobody is going to be taking the other side, and the outcome of that question has no particular bearing on the question of whether human/robot hybrid missions might be more productive on, say, Mars. (It worries me that you don’t seem to understand the difference.)
jack lecou@209
We’re only talking about planetary landings
You are; I’m not. I’m talking about the best use of the limited resources available for space exploration, as I’ve said more than once. NASA (and any other state-supported space programme) has to compete with many other calls on funding (and expertise and skilled labour), so will for the forseeable future have a limited budget. It is simple fact that human and robotic exploration are in competition for funding, and will be for some decades at least.
@192:
Well that would depend on much faster ways of getting there than are currently available, and if they become available, they’ll be available for robotic missions as well, although obviously they are not essential for the latter.
You’ve mentioned gravity and radiation as the big obstacles to human planetary exploration. There’s at least one more, relevant to both the moon and Mars: dangerous dust. In the case of the moon, the danger comes from the lack of atmosphere: dust particles don’t get smoothed down, and the effects of inhaling even relatively small quantities of such “sharp dust” are unknown. In the case of Mars, the problem is that a significant proportion of the surface (maybe 0.5%) consists of percholorates, which are highly toxic. Now you can try to keep dust out of your underground habitat, but it’s at the least going to add a significant source of danger and delay, and there’s no obvious way to check how much of a problem it’s going to be in advance.
/tbc
KG @210
No, we both are. Because that’s the only matter that’s under debate. And making better use of limited resources is precisely the argument I’m making.
Again, there’s nobody arguing that something like a weather satellite should have a human crew onboard. Not even a Martian weather satellite. Automated platforms are very obviously the right tool for that job. And most other remote-sensing jobs too, including telescopes like Hubble or JWST, or outer solar system flybys like New Horizons. Automated platforms are also a good approach to what I would characterize as “scouting” of planetary surfaces — basic landers and rovers to take atmospheric and chemical readings, flying drones (where possible) for closer in remote sensing, etc.
You appear to be arguing that all of that is relevant somehow. That it must be taken as evidence that robots are superior in general. That we can just extrapolate from that to every other aspect of space exploration, no more thinking needed.
But it doesn’t work like that. Not all jobs are scouting or remote sensing jobs. Space is not a single place, and exploring it involves — or will involve — a lot of different activities, some of which are much less well-suited to zero-contact automation than others.
We are, arguably, already well past those limits in the Mars rover program. Unattended rover exploration is the only thing going on there at the moment not because it is actually more productive or making the best use of resources in a big-picture sense (relative to a more balanced program), but because it is institutionally advantageous (especially given NASA’s fairly dismal post-Apollo leadership in launch capability development)
What rover-only exploration has going for it is just that it’s amenable to a piecemeal approach. It can be done slowly over decades, in tiny, budget-palatable bites, without being overly constrained by limited launch capabilities. But in the end, that’s fairly faint praise. A robot+human mission would certainly cost much more initially — a few hundred times as much as a single rover, especially for the R&D. But there’s every reason to be believe that such a human capability would subsequently also be able to get much, much more done than even hundreds and hundreds of rover missions. (And even if it only did the same amount, it would at least be doing it far more quickly and efficiently.)
Again, I concede that all of the above calculus might well change with sufficient leaps forward in unattended robotics and automation technology. But a lot of other calculus would change at that point too, including much of the calculus that says “expensive” is a consideration that matters in the first place. Conjecture about that world is…conjecture.
(There are probably a few more jobs where the math works out too, in addition to surface exploration. For example, I expect it will be useful to have humans at least around for activities like in-space construction/assembly/repair. Activities which might accelerate if lower launch costs finally make in-orbit assembly more routine for new space stations, factories, and telescopes.
Again lots of different jobs: Repairing something like Hubble or JWST is actually different job than either deploying it or taking pictures through it. Even if a lot of activity is automated in principle, having humans available for on-site troubleshooting to quickly recover from mishaps or unexpected situations potentially makes a huge difference in cost and viability for more complex platforms. It’s the Audi factory problem again.)
All else equal, faster would obviously be better — some kind of fusion rocket or something that could make a Mars trip in 6 weeks or 6 days instead of 6 months would go a long way to solving the deep-space radiation problem — but speed is not really a fundamental requirement for human exploration.
Even with more or less conventional propulsion and trajectories, Jupiter can be reached in a handful of years. With cheap fuel, and IF radiation is “solved” in some other way (heavier and/or better shielding, exotic DNA repair drugs, etc.), the biggest problem with that journey would probably be boredom. (Maybe they’ll figure out hibernation by then.)
I think gravity (particularly if fractional gravity is as bad as zero-g) and radiation are potentially fundamental barriers that could require significant breakthroughs in fields like propulsion or biological manipulation to solve, at least in the long term.
The various kinds of hazardous dust are certainly a problem, a significant one, but one whose solution looks like it should have a much more linear engineering path. There’s already a lot of work being done, and some promising ideas. Suit fabrics and systems that are more resistant to dust damage, active systems to repel it, “dust” locks which would use various electrostatic, compressed gas, liquid nitrogen, and vacuum treatments to remove what remains. In the worst case, or for smaller vehicles, there’s Suitport. A lot of that research is being done for the Moon specifically, but it’s likely to transfer fairly well to Mars as well, particularly once we have actual dust samples to work with.
So, dust is tricky, but I don’t think it looks like a fundamental barrier right now.
(Ditto for lots of other things, like efficient air and water recycling, growing fresh food, ISRU, or the myriad of other problems big and small which will need to be solved, or solutions further perfected, for human trips out to Mars and beyond to be viable. I certainly don’t think all the problems are 100% solved yet, far from it. That’s one of the reasons the initial R&D investment for a deep space human capability will be expensive. But for most of them, I also don’t see any reason that they’re likely to be intractable. Mostly it’s simply a matter of investment, and, perhaps, having some place to validate and gain experience in-situ.)
@211. jack lecou :
(Italics original.)
Well, if its a Martian one then its up to the Martians ain’t it? I imagine they’d crew it with Martians but ack ack, er, hey, I could be wrong! ;-)
StevoR, is that what you noticed? I mean, yes, I get you are being jocular, but still.
This is what I noticed:
As in, ‘we are both talking about space exploration, but I concede that weather satellites don’t need to be crewed’.
(I noticed even more than that)
[also, I do like “human crew” — as opposed to a non-human crew, presumably]
@John Morales
Both talking about surface exploration, not space exploration generically. (Indeed, specific aspects of surface exploration.) The distinction is critical to the point.
And “concede” isn’t really the right word. I wouldn’t “concede” that automated satellites are the right tool for mapping or weather observation any more than I’d “concede” that a chisel is a better tool than a screwdriver for cutting a dovetail in a drawer face. That fact isn’t a concession, it’s integral to the point: a chisel being the right tool for one job does not in any way imply that the chisel is also the right tool for removing an outlet cover or chopping an onion.
While we’re on the subject of tools, it might be helpful to point out that there is a kind of corollary to Maslow’s Hammer at work here. If all you have is a hammer, every task you see might look like a nail, but there might also be many tasks you don’t yet see at all. Because they don’t look sufficiently like nails.
It’s a kind of status quo bias, epitomized in your own repeated observation that all Martian surface exploration has been done by rovers. Absolutely true. It’s the only tool we currently have.
But you may as well observe that every home repair you’ve ever done has been done with a hammer. I’d have no reason to doubt that, particularly if I knew it was the only tool you had. However, it doesn’t follow that a hammer was actually always the best tool, or that the jobs you’ve managed to do so far are the only ones that will need doing. For that, you need to look past the status quo and use some imagination. Have you thought about how difficult and time consuming it’s going to be to use your hammer to redo the peeling paint on the porch railing?
In the news: https://www.space.com/spacex-german-military-satellites-launch-december-2023