To address your last point, regarding exploration, the historical answer is, “none of the above.” Many governments throughout history have supported physical exploration because they saw it as leading to access to new or better resources; better trade routes; military expansion; and getting rid of what they defined as undesirable people. At least the first three of these could ultimately apply to spaceflight. In general, I suspect most governments support scientists because they develop better weapons and, secondarily, better industries. Science for pure knowledge’s sake is a relatively new idea, but even here it probably grew out of the military’s observation, during the first half of the last century, of what pure science could lead to.

This brings us back to the separate discussion of breaking up NASA. What happens if space science is separated from the wider NASA? Right now, space science (widely defined) gets an outlandish amount of money compared to the other sciences. We have to ask ourselves why. My suspician is that it is strongly tied to the American mythology of a frontier, and if the wider culture and government came to believe that the automated space program were completely unsupportive of achieving that myth in the Solar System, the money would rapidly dry up. There’s only one way to find out, but if I were a space scientist I would take that risk with great care.

I would have ‘come around’ to this position only if I hadn’t held it from the beginning. I’m not the one changing my tune in this discussion.

It should also be noted that there are things that remote observation can do better than direct contact — why do you think we have terrestrial remote sensing satellites?

The more cogent argument against colonization for science is not that on-site access is useless, but that it isn’t worth the cost. The same argument can be made against unmanned planetary missions, though.

Behind all this is the question: why does the government fund science at all? Direct societal benefit from the scientific results? Spinoff technology? Spinoff of excess grad students into industry? Maintaining a cadre of scientists who can be diverted to weapons work during wartime?

However stated (or misstated by me), my initial position was and has been that automated remote observation is not sufficient. You need human scientists, on site, doing laboratory science to truly understand an object or location. Wherever that is possible — in the next few decades or so, the moon, Mars, the Martian moons, near-Earth asteroids — we should do it.

there are things that [remote observation] can’t easily do that direct contact can, I won’t argue otherwise

I’m glad you’ve come around to my point-of-view!

— Donald

Non sequitur, Donald. I wasn’t claiming that remote observation is sufficient. I was claiming it was science. You are the one who made the absurd claim it wasn’t ‘real science’.

If you are now retreating to the much more defensible position that remote observation is science, but that there are things that it can’t easily do that direct contact can, I won’t argue otherwise. Perhaps you should have taken this position to begin with, though.

You need both. I am not saying that you should not do the best you can when physical exploration is not possible, but where ever it is, you will always get better results by going there. To take one of your examples, sure, you can discover pulsars from Earth, and you can learn a lot by studying the radiation they emit, and you should even get a Nobel prize for your (provisional) discoveries. But, if that ever proves possible, there is no question that you would get far more detailed and reliable results by going there and physically sampling the environment. (For example, if there were an asteroid or Kuiper belt, you might be able to determine facts about the pre-pulsar star from buried regolith, which is an obvious prerequisite to true understanding of the formation of that pulsar.)

We are not going to a pulsar anytime soon, if ever. But, we can go to Earth’s moon and Mars, and we will get far better science if we do.

— Donald

The scientific method must involve hypotheses that make predictions that can then be tested. There is no need for these predictions to involve experiments that can be set up in entirely in a laboratory.

Look at the Nobel Prizes for physics. Depending on how you count, up to nine of them have involved things you would not consider ‘real science’. Among them: the short period binary pulsar and its use in testing general relativity (1993), discovery of pulsars (1974), discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (1978), physics of degenerate stars (1983), a couple on cosmic radiation (1936, 1948), one on the ionosphere (1947), and extraterrestrial neutrino and x-ray astronomy (2002).

Maybe you should write to Stockholm and complain about all the fake science awards they’ve been giving out.

To be a real science, Astronomy needs scientists on site, taking real samples, and conducting physical (geochemical) experiments on them.

— Donald

Yes, I guess most of astronomy isn’t ‘real science’.

Who knew?

Yes, that is YOUR OPINION.

The current Mars rovers are on the border, and their success is mostly reconnaissance with an extremely tiny experimental component.

You’re setting up a tortured distinction between “reconnaissance” and science.