But as an American with no ties nor special knowledge of America’s efforts to explore and exploit space an nearby objects, I do have to say that as long as America spends its trillions on social welfare and buying and bailing out corporations and banks…well, that doesn’t leave anything in the honey pot for notable explorations either to space or to deep oceans.

Yes, we need to go to both, explore, learn and exploit. That is the nature of mankind. But as it stands now in 2009, the only hope we have of either in not government efforts but private efforts.

And you know, that is sad…in many, many ways.

God Bless those that have given their all and even their lives to make America’s space efforts something not only for the history books but for the advancement of mankind. It is unfortunate that most of those that did so, are now departed and that their knowledge, beliefs and fervor have not been replaced by the current generations.

Sad indeed.

Papa Ray
West Texas
USA

— Donald

Robots are not automatic, they are remote operated tools operated by humans. The human judgement is still there, just sitting comfortably with a cup of coffee in an easy chair, not worry about have to get back to the shelter before their suit runs out of consumables. And with additional sets of eyeballs watching to see what they might miss. That is why ROV’s are replacing human subs in ocean research. Not as romantic but much more practical.

Also I think you are referring to Ansel Adams, not John Muir. John Muir was mostly a nature writer. And all you have to do is look at the photos from various space robots, starting with the great image of Lunar Orbiter 2 of Copernicus which was called the picture of the year when it was taken.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/section2b.htm

The only difference is the person clicking the shutter was a bit further away then Ansel Adams was.

The difficulty of repairing robots is exactly why you will need astronauts at a lunar base, not to do the actual field work as you keep arguing. That will be done by remote control from Earth, opening it up to dozens, perhaps hundreds of geologists, not just one or two that are able to make it to the Moon as astronauts. And the geologists on the moon will probaly just be doing the preliminary lab work at the lunar base on the samples the rovers return before shipping them to labs on Earth. Now that is a job humans will be good at.

I certainly grant the paradigm shift. I only argue that it is a mistake when employed where not necessary. There have been many examples of paradigm shifts that have proven to be mistakes, and I don’t think that the fact of a paradigm shift, by itself, proves that you and other advocates of the shift correct. Likewise, the fact that scientists are doing something in the ocean does not mean, by itself, that they are correct to abandon another way of doing it. While I know little about ocean exploration, I would tend to suspect that exclusively automating that will prove a mistake for the advancement of science, as well.

By contrast tele-operated robotic technology are surging forward rapidly,

I grant this too. That does not change the fact that these technologies have a long, long way to go before they can match the innate skills of a human being. Nor is field work itself the only consideration. John Muir could never have taken his photos through the lense of a teleoperated robot, and these images created a more important paradigm shift than anything, so far, to come out of the automated space program. Likewise, the visual and verbal imagery generated by Apollo-8.

Many industrial applications, like mining, are already heavily robotic.

There is a world of difference between automating mining in a known environment, and automating field discovery, especially in a truly alien and largely unknown environment like the lunar surface. Just because you can do one does not necessarily mean you can do the other.

astronuats end of spending most of their time working on the lunar exploration rovers

Well, who else is going to do it? Automating repair of machinery has an even less satisfactory history than automating field geology. Even simple change-out of “black boxes” has proven extremely difficult to automate in the relatively benign environment of LEO. And you seriously think we’re going to miraculously do the far more difficult task of rover repair in the harsh and unknown environment of the lunar surface?

new suits are not going to improve humans very much over the capabilities they had during Apollo

This is widely believed, but demonstrably wrong. Astronauts are doing today on the Space Station tasks that were undreampt of by Apollo astronauts, who did little more than retrieve film canisters. There is no reason at all to believe that Apollo surface skills cannot be improved upon to a similar degree. More significantly, look at the dramatic learning curve from Apollo-11 to Apollo-17, which occurred far, far faster, and to a immeasurably greater degree, than any improvement in robotic techniques. If that learning curve had been allowed to continue, we would now know a lot more about the moon than we will with any conceivable set of teleoperated machines.

— Donald

Actually I had a number of geology classes when I was majoring in geological engineering at New Mexico Tech. And have done field work both in connection with those classes and helping friends who were doing field work for their Ph.D’s, and Masters.

And I have studied history and know when I see a paradigm shift occuring in a field. It already has occurred in ocean exploration as I have noted. Int he 1960’s the focus was on human research subs for ocean research. The new focus is on ROVs and its unlikely humans will travel as deep in the ocean as they did in the 1960’s for many, many years into the future.

The key point is that new suits are not going to improve humans very much over the capabilities they had during Apollo. By contrast tele-operated robotic technology are surging forward rapidly, driven by their value in doing tasks on Earth. Many industrial applications, like mining, are already heavily robotic.

But I don’t need to argue this further as the evidence will be when we return to the moon and the astronuats end of spending most of their time working on the lunar exlporation rovers and not doing the field work to the extent it had to be done on Apollo. I know space advocates really hope that space exploration will be like work, but its going to be far more like the visions of Issac Asimove versus that of Arthur C.Clarke and Robert Heinlien.

Interesting that you would raise this point, since, to this date, astronauts watching out of Space Station windows regularly see things that orbital cameras have missed. In pattern recognition (if in little else), the human eye still reigns supreme. The problem is that, you (this isn’t personal, too many people do it) ignore the news from the human space program, and only look at the “science” half of things.

You are dead wrong about field work Have you done any? Read the scientific histories of Apollo. Take a geology course.

it is to collect, plot and analyze samples from the field to map the distribution of different geological characteristics to identify patterns.

This is precisely what humans are good at and robots are not. In only three days, Apollo-17 astronauts (with first generation planetary equipment and space suits) did a detailed survey of an entire alpine valley, complete with up- and cross-sun imagery of many thousands of targets, obtained many hundreds of intelligently-collected samples, explored steep talus-covered slopes and inside many tens of craters (something Opportunity has done with only great difficulty in a small handful of mostly shallow craters, and Spirit has avoided doing at all). They casually picked up and examined from all angles many hundreds of rocks, of many different sizes and textures, from loose breccas to fines to boulders.

Apollo-16 astronauts found and delt with a landscape very different from what your robots had led them to expect, efficiently and in real time. Apollo-14 astronauts survived being lost and still achieved all but one of their major goals. Not one astronaut was lost on the moon, in sharp contrast to what has happened to your robots on Mars.

Study what actually happened. Even at its enormously high cost, the scientific efficiency of first generation Apollo was so high relative to what nth-generation robots can achieve that it is far from clear that the money is better spent on the latter (and I think the reverse the case). Given that we want to send astronauts back to the moon anyway for other reasons and thus cover some of the cost, the science justification becomes very strong.

Just because “everyone knows” that robots are better does not make it true. Don’t just follow the pack: study the real history, then make your conclusions.

— Donald