Read for comprehension, Al. We were talking about Mars. In case you hadn’t noticed, we haven’t sent any astronauts to Mars, and most politicians have been at best indifferent and at worst downright hostile to the idea.

Huh?

The revealed preferences of the political system is that the politicians are willing to pay significant amounts of funding to put humans in space.

The revealed preferences of the political system is that the space scientists get a huge free “political” ride on the back of the “humans in space” political support.

Why do I assert this?

The science value of a dollar that goes to the NSF, is much higher than the science value of a dollar in NASA space science.

But how do you value creating the 2nd branch of human civilization on Mars?

How do you value forever protecting homo sapiens, and life in general, from a global catastrophe that could destroy all life on Earth?

How do you value extending life into the rest of the Solar System, and eventually (in the long-term) beyond?

None of these “values” are science-based values, but if you asked the average citizen on the street if this was a good thing, the majority of them would say “Yes”. In other words, they value it.

These are the real values issues, and many scientists tend to lose sight of them (or intentionally ignore them) in the fight for “more money” for their pet science projects.

– Al

… unless rich old eccentrics want to avoid the flu (but they can isolate on Earth) and avoid breaking bones when falling…they could live on the Moon.

Warren Buffet could have bought the Moon, and paved the way for his friend Bill. I guess he didn’t see the “value” in the Moon or in keeping billions. Throw that old folks home boundary condition / idea / thought out.

There is still the Sadam Hussein jail possibility for the Moon. Maybe he could do some geology or operate a telescope for humanity in exchange for a food and water dump off occasionally. It could even be low security – he could pretty much roam the Moon and bravely explore. But it would cost too much, like Alcatraz. Throw that idea out.

As for interesting geology, predicting when the Yellowstone super volcano will erupt would help humanity.

I am out of “value” ideas. Seems the main reason we will go to Mars is just to go to Mars and back, and to prove we can survive elsewhere. It seems too simple to be true, but the reason we go into space is simply to survive, and to improve life on Earth. And if survival is the only prime requirement, then it is an almost absurd present culture to say “kill a lot of Astronauts to do questionable value geology”, or to hear NASA say the (unquantified shuttle) risk is acceptable and the Astronauts know the risk they are taking when the only “value” seems to be to keep the Astronaut alive. Maybe this is what we never learned from Apollo 13, that a mission can be a complete failure, and yet deemed a tremendous success by Congress (some crying) simply because the crew survived. Amazing NASA never learned this and gave up the launch escape system. As automakers added crash dummy tests and the air bags, NASA went the other direction. And there were more mistakes in Apollo 13 than either shuttle loss – failure was an option after all, and the Apollo design, not the management reviews, is what allowed success.

Right stuff irrational exuberance.

I’m going to agree to disagree on the rest of your statement, but the above is false on its face. If it were true, why are space scientists complaining? The political powers that be — rightly or wrongly — have chosen to continue funding human spaceflight at a far larger rate than many or most scientists would wish. They do that — again, rightly or wrongly — partly because of their perceptions of the potentail scientific value of, say, the Space Station.

Thus, The revealed preferences of the political system are quite contrary to those of many, if not most, space scientists. In addition, the relatively large number of papers in scientific journals attempting to justify human spaceflight (e.g., Earth, Moon, and Planets; New Scientist) shows that even the body of scientific opinion is softening on this issue.

— Donald

No, it’s an empirical observation. The revealed preferences of the political system is that the robotic missions meet the affordable + valuable test, but manned missions don’t. Of course, you could argue that just because something is funded doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile, but that doesn’t seem to be a road manned space advocates would really want to be going down.

I think you overstate what a real-world set of manned Mars mission is going to be able to accomplish, btw.

I do not argue that the MERs should not have been sent. But, now that they have been sent and they’ve given us some ground-truth data, sending a lot more would be a waste.

They have barely scratched the surface of what they can do on Mars (if not at the current sites), and manned missions are and will remain vaporware for decades. For that matter, fine tuning what those incredibly expensive and limited manned visits would do would be reason enough to send more unmanned precursors.

but they typically can’t do it at a price that is justified by the value of the results.

There are plenty of terrestrial scientists who would consider spending well over $1 billion to determine that there were probably small pools of standing water on Mars at some undetermined date in the past as “unaffordable” as you consider a human mission that might actually determine things like when the flooding occured, its nature, how often and how long, what may have lived in it, how they may have evolved over time and space — the detailed history of the “seas” over time — questions the MERs and their ilk will never be able to answer in finite time and cost.

Maybe actually getting detailed answers should be considered a part of determining what is “affordable.” Again, if it’s worth spending “billions” to find out just the fact that there may be a history of water on Mars, than perhaps is worth spending “billions and billions” to actually find out what that history was. If we don’t care, why are we spending the money at all?

I do not argue that the MERs should not have been sent. But, now that they have been sent and they’ve given us some ground-truth data, sending a lot more would be a waste. Spending $1 billion each to return an extremely limited set of data over a few kilometers is not an efficient use of whatever funds we choose to dedicate to answering questions about the detailed geology (and possible paleontology) of Mars.

If we care about these questions, we need to send a crew of human geologists on a long-term expedition to produce many deep cores over a wide territory. Nothing less is going to produce the answers planetary scientists claim to seek.

— Donald

Than, why don’t we just send robots to Antarctica, and save all the money and personal risk “wasted” on sending and supporting people at this expensive location?

Quite simply, because robots cannot do the job.

This is, of course, only half the answer. The other half is that it’s far cheaper (and safer) to send people to Antarctica (and support them there) than it is to send them to space.

In space, yes, astronauts can do things that robots can’t, but they typically can’t do it at a price that is justified by the value of the results. So, restricted to the set of things that are both feasible and affordable, we use robots instead.

Than, why don’t we just send robots to Antarctica, and save all the money and personal risk “wasted” on sending and supporting people at this expensive location?

Quite simply, because robots cannot do the job. When we successfully demonstrate doing all the tasks that people do in Antarctica (or in deep sea drilling or deep sea surface shipping) with robots in the near future and for a finite amount of money, then I’ll concede at least that it is possible. (Desirable or cost effective are two other questions.)

Until then, space scientists are just dreaming. They will never answer any but the very easiest of their serious geological questions the way they are going about it now. In the mean time, they are wasting a lot of the money that could be spent to develop the tools that could answer their questions.

— Donald

On another board my question about remote control was said to be too costly/impractical

It’s too politically costly to do, half of the old astronaut corps being politicians now and all.