A stupid man
Do you like NASA and space research? Sorry, it’s all going away. The man in charge is not qualified, as if that is any surprise.
Sean Duffy, the acting administrator of NASA for a little more than a month, has vowed to make the United States great in space.
With a background as a US Congressman, reality TV star, and television commentator, Duffy did not come to the position with a deep well of knowledge about spaceflight. He also already had a lot on his plate, serving as the secretary of transportation, a Cabinet-level position that oversees 55,000 employees across 13 agencies.
Sean Duffy is not the right person to run just about anything. My brain shut down at “reality TV star”.
What he’s planning to do is worrisome.
Nevertheless, Duffy is putting his imprint on the space agency, seeking to emphasize the agency’s human exploration plans, including the development of a lunar base, and ending NASA’s efforts to study planet Earth and its changing climate.
Putting humans in space? Robots do it better. Let’s not look at the damage the Trump administration is doing to the Earth — turn off the satellites that are looking at the planet.
This has been done before. Do you remember when Bush 2 touted his “Manned Mission to Mars” initiative which consumed all of NASA’s budget, starving other efforts, many of which were directed towards climate study?
Does Duffy have any idea what a permanent, manned lunar base would cost? You can forget about all those pretty domed, surface structures from past sci-fi films and novels. The moon has no atmosphere and is constantly being bombarded by cosmic radiation and micrometeorites that don’t burn up the way they do on Earth. Those domes would need to be constructed of very robust materials to block the x-rays and the high velocity space rocks. That probably means going underground or putting a cover over a smallish impact crater (the same holds true with Musk’s Mars fantasy). It’s thought that there are deep lava tubes that might be converted into habitable spaces. But, think of the massive engineering project required to do that. We’d need earth moving equipment and construction teams trained to work in a low gravity, airless environment. It’s clear to me that he’s talking out of his ass.
Duffy and the rest of the administration are clueless assholes doing their best to cripple this country’s science capability for the next century, so no argument there.
But I do wish the “Robots do [space exploration] better.” myth would die.
“Better” is just not really true. If expensive, intricate, awkwardly tele-operated robots did exploration and research better, there’d be a lot more robots and lot fewer human scientists crawling around in jungles and volcanic lava fields and drilling into ice sheets, or even puttering around in labs tending to spider colonies.
Robots don’t do science better. That’s silly. Obviously, we do use drones and machines sometimes in field work, but whenever practicable, it seems to be the case that it’s actually better to have humans as close to the action as possible too. If nothing else, the humans often enjoy it.
Robots really aren’t even cheaper in the long term, at least per unit of science. Rover missions are “cheap” initially, but the trend is to become increasingly expensive as more and more specialized, bespoke hardware has to be designed each time ino order push the science incrementally further. For Mars, say, by the time you send 50 robot missions, over the course of a couple of centuries, it would have been cheaper to just send a couple of missions with generalist bio-robots (aka people). The humans do require a much larger upfront investment, but have a huge tail of flexibility that means they can do exponentially more.
Which brings us to the actual advantage of robots: they’re not better, they’re not cheaper. But they do come in smaller minimum purchase quantities. If you all you can buy is 1 unit of “science” at a time, robots might be all you can manage to do.
It’s almost exactly like buying toilet paper in single rolls from the convenience store every week vs. buying a huge package from Costco that’ll last you a decade. Sure, if you have a very tight budget, the single rolls might be the best you can do. But buying in bulk is still better and cheaper, you just can’t afford the cheaper option.
Maybe John Watts @2 has a point: these lackwits were raised on SF paperback covers often depicting some “pretty domed city” and being somewhat challenged in the brainpan department they took and still take them as credible, feasible projects – see also EMusk’s obsession with his “Mars town”.
Being arrogant and ignorant they won’t stand any correction and so they plow on… towards failure. Taking with themselves a true jewel as NASA in this case.
(Make no mistake, those illos WERE pretty, think Chesley Bonestell and all the rest…)
@3 jack lecou
They undoubtedly do. Most of your post is moving strawmen past the goalpost, insisting that since robots are better at space exploration, they must be better at earth exploration. What the bleep does that have to do with space exploration? Robots do not need air to breathe or food to eat, they have wider requirements for temperature, radiation protection, etc. and very few of us cry when the robots don’t come home after their adventures.
Go suck a lemon.
… and maybe people should see what’s the current status of NASA’s plans before imputing lackwittery and domes to the proponents and the proposal.
cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_lunar_outpost_concepts#Artemis_Base_Camp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Foundational_Surface_Habitat
The Weinersmiths (of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fame) actually did a lot of research about the issues with human colonies on the Moon or Mars, and wrote a book about it: A City On Mars.
Basically, there are a lot of issues that I’ve never heard anyone mention and presumably none of the people pushing these things have seriously thought about, and the take-away from the book is that it is a lot harder and a lot more complicated than people imagine.
Colony ≠ base, Allison.
Entirely different things.
NASA has satellites and research projects that produce evidence that climate change is real. So the clear solution is to stop that, because inconvenient truths are not something anyone in government wants to hear.
Meanwhile, NASA is an institution that most Americans are proud of, so they should be seen as doing something, so they need a mission. Something that plays well to an audience convinced of American exceptionalism. Something that sounds pioneering like … a moon base. Even better if the government doesn’t actually fund the agency to the point at which anything actually gets done, because that way there’s no risk of anything actually failing.
And that way NASA can be best used for what it’s really for: funneling public money into the aerospace industry.
Ugh. Not this petty, ugly, short-sighted, mean bashing of the whole field of Human space exploration again.
What is it with some on the Left’s hatred for the whole idea of people exploring and learning and going places beyond our planet?
Space exploration – human and robot alike – has its own value and advances technology and knowledge. Serendipity is a thing. Wonder and awe and benefits from it are things.
Computers – robots – can do maths well too. Many people hate mathematics and aren’t much good at it. Does that mean we reject the idea of humans doing advanced maths and studying it and render that whole field of expertise and knowledge and development worthless and something we just shouldn’t bother with?
FFS!
Oh and yeah, its costly. So are other fields of research. Eg the building LHC to study particle physics. Sending people to study the deep oceans and poles.
This anti-human space exploration shit seems to me like its just an appeal to Luddite personal prejudice and wilful ignorance – I don’t like or see the appeal of X whilst others do so I should get my way and we shouldn’t bother doing X. Its like philistines saying I don’t like art so we shouldn’t do it or academics mocking sport making a big thing of I don’t do or like it so it has no value and why should we spend money on it?
Yes, NASA should be run by competent experts in the field of space exploration -astronauts or those with experience. Yes, what Trump is doing is criminal and sets us all back globally. but lets focus on that & not attacking the whole notion of human space exploration shall we?
PS. Also #3 jack lecou is spot on. Just compare the results and what we learnt and achieved from the Apollo landing versus the previous robotic missions to our Moon.
PPS. Yes we should be furious about shutting down earth science and NASA’s climate research and things like this :
Source : https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/13/climate/nasa-satellites-trump-budget-cuts-weather
NB. Clarity fix for #9 : Yes, NASA should be run by competent experts in the field of space exploration -astronauts or those with relevant experience.
@ 5 Reginald Selkirk
This crap again. I like how you clowns are working purely on “feels” and totally ignore the actual experts who say over and over again that humans shit all over robots.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/09/22/whats-the-worst-job/#comment-2195354
I mean why should we listen the director of the robitic mars exploration rover program when we can listen to Reginald Selkirk, random ignorant idiot no-nothing just making shit up?
Reginald Selkirk @5: Robots do not need air to breathe or food to eat, they have wider requirements for temperature, radiation protection, etc. and very few of us cry when the robots don’t come home after their adventures.
By that measure, rocks should be even better. They also don’t need to breathe or eat, and can survive even higher temperatures and radiation levels than robots. Does that actually make rocks better space explorers?
No. Of course not. Because sheer survival isn’t actually the point. The point is what can they actually do after they clear the basic threshold of surviving long enough to do the thing. Rocks can’t do much of anything. Robots can do a little (given a lot of engineering effort). Humans can do a ton.
Humans are indisputably better space explorers once they get there. But getting them there also undeniably does require climbing a big, expensive mountain on things like life support system engineering, radiation shielding, and plain old bulk mass. So robots, even though they are far, far, far less capable, are “cheaper” in a very limited sense (when your budget horizon is very short).
And that’s not the same as “better” — it’s not really even “cheaper”.
So better is absolutely a myth. A damaging myth, because a lot of people hearing or saying that (I don’t know about you or PZ) don’t just mean “robots eke out a little bit of science on the shoestring budget”, they literally think robot explorers are doing just as well as humans, and that humans are unnecessary in space forevermore. That having a couple robotic rovers on Mars, for example, means that all possible science is already being done there. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As an aside, it’s weird to me especially to hear this kind of nonsense coming from fellow humanists and people on the left who really ought to know better. There are plenty of dickhead CEO/MBA types out there who would talk all day about how, say, shitty AI customer support robots are “better” using almost exactly the same logic: not because they actually solve real problems better, but because they take up less office space and you don’t have to feed them. But everyone else ought to know better.
So, jack; you reckon a human would be doing better than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1 ?
@15:
There’s at least a couple ways to look at that.
In one way, no. Pointing out that an unqualified statement like “robots do it better” is false is not a claim that robots never do it better. That’s an excluded middle fallacy: the opposite of “robots do it better” isn’t “humans do it better”, it’s “humans and robots together do it better”.
So I’m obviously not saying that weather or communication satellites, for example should be manned. Or Voyager 1. That would be silly. Weather satellites work great, and are an appropriate technology for the thing they need to do. Just like welding robots work great on a factory assembly line. But just because robots work well in a particular role doesn’t mean “robots do it better” works as a general statement. If “robots do it better” were actually true, we should conclude that we also don’t need a manned space station. Unmanned satellites must be able to do all the same science the space station has (and better!). Yet that’s trivially false, and just as silly as manning weather satellites.
The right answer for space exploration is obviously a mix of both: robots where robots are better, people where people are better. (Indeed, in some respects they work best together: robots for particularly repetitive, lengthy or dangerous tasks, humans for creative, improvisational work — and to fix the robots when they break down.)
This is all rather obvious. That humans and robots are complementary, and thus that humans have a role to play in space exploration, is an obvious truth that a simplistic and unqualified statement like “robots do it better” desperately attempts to steamroll over.
Back to your question about Voyager, I’d say in another way, absolutely, yes. I reckon that if you sent humans on roughly the same outward journey as Voyager 1 (with a ship big enough to carry everything to sustain them indefinitely: crops, recycling, recreation, and humans plural because we generally need company) we would have almost infinitely more. It would be complicated and expensive as hell, sure. We couldn’t have done it in 1977, and probably won’t for decades yet. But when we do manage to, it will tell us a whole heck of a lot more than Voyager could. Think of what those explorers could see and do that Voyager simply can’t. The ad hoc follow up observations controllers on Earth couldn’t do or never even realized were an opportunity. The detailed on-site lab studies of ejecta from the Jovian system and the Oort cloud. Nevermind the imagination, the inspiration. To have human beings out there radioing us thoughts and poetry from the edge of the solar system, for Cthulhu’s sake, on their way to parts unknown. Incomparable.