— Donald

By defining an automated mission as “science” and a human expedition like Apollo (which actually provided far more answers than any related set of automated missions to date) as “non-science,” you are failing to fully appreciate either, and you are doing neither activity any favors.

The automated exploration of the Solar System is extremely valuable and it provides a large amount of data. But it will not and cannot provide the “understanding” (to use your term) that a geologist (or biologist) strolling through Valles Marineris with a hammer (or a microscope and a chemistry lab) and her mind can provide just by being there. That is science, at least as much (and I would argue far more than) anything we are doing today.

It is this confusion, of defining one technique as “science” and another as “[non-science] exploration” that results in our spending such vast sums on “science” that cannot answer our fundamental questions — or scratch much most of our exploration, commercial, and artistic itches, which are some of the other reasons we explore.

— Donald

I think you’re conflating or confusing two separate issues. You say you’re okay with experts allocating funding amounts within their broad disciplines, and that it’s the overall funding level for the broad discipline (space science) that you question. But then, in the very next sentence, you attack specific mission or program funding allocations (MERS or the MEP line) and compare them to another specific funding allocation (Antartic research) that lies outside the broad discipline.

I’m going to assume that you are in fact okay with the specific funding allocation issue — that you are okay with the Decadal Review process and the fact that it ranks certain targets (like Mars) and/or missions (like MERS) high and that their share of the space science budget is correspondingly high.

On the issue of overall funding, I’d refer you back to my prior post. Again, the reality is that the human animal, for better or worse, is curious about the universe beyond Earth. Medical science or Antarctic research, as critical as they may be for our health or the health of our planet, do not bear on questions about where the universe and our homeworld come from, where it’s all headed on a cosmological scale, whether there are other worlds like ours, and whether we’re unique and alone in the universe. And since the time of Aristotle (and probably earlier, witness Stonehenge), human society has allocated some small fraction of its collective wealth towards answering those questions. It may seem to be a stupifyingly simple answer, but we allocate a few billions of dollars to answering astronomical questions because we’re curious monkeys that have always asked these questions and have always allocated similar amounts of our societal wealth to answering them in the only way that we can — by looking up.

I’d also refer you back to an earlier thread where we had a similar debate, and I produced some budget data from a National Academies study on disciplinary health and figures of merit. That data showed that we do in fact spend considerably larger sums on more pressing research needs (e.g., medical sciences) and comparable amounts in other, more curiousity-driven research areas. I’d also note that the Europeans, when all their ESA and national programs are added up, also spend in neighborhood of a couple billion plus on the space sciences. Despite figuring in the billions, the amount we spend on space science is not as out-of-bounds as it might first appear when we delve into the numbers and comparisons to other research expenditures or other national space science programs are made.

“We do that because of history (the high priority accorded to space science as part of the prep for the Apollo program)”

You’ve argued that the overall space science funding level is a product of Apollo legacy. I would argue that the Apollo legacy argument is wrong because it ignores the fact that we’ve been spending resources (whether it’s armies of stone-cutters in prehistoric Britain or the minds of philosophical schools in ancient Greece or the private wealth of the Medicis in Renaissance Italy or taxes to pay for modern observatories) trying to answer astronomical questions since time immemorial. I would also argue that the Apollo legacy argument is wrong because space science funding has actually increased substantially (not remained at legacy levels) in various periods since Apollo (and almost exclusively on the back of initiatives aimed at targets other than the Moon).

“and because of the frontier myths I mentioned above.”

This argument confuses exploration of physical frontiers (what’s over the next hill or ocean) with scientific research (what is the structure of the natural world and how does it work). Human space exploration is about the former; space science is about the latter.

Although it can sometimes deliver scientific data, human space exploration is first and foremost about experience. When it’s not driven by Cold War competition, post-Cold War cooperation, or pork-barrel politics, human space exploration is about seeing what it’s like to be out there, to see if there’s a frontier worth sending more of our species to.

Conversely, although it can sometimes provide an exploratory experience (what is it like to walk around the surface of Mars), space science is funded first and foremost to provide insights into the workings of nature. For space science (or any scientific field) to be successful, it must provide understanding, not just experience.

Funding for human space exploration may depend in part on the frontier myth. But even if the frontier myth disappeared tomorrow, space science will still be funded to answer fundamental questions about how nature is structured and works beyond Earth.

“automated missions to Mars — which are funded to the tune of billions of dollars because they benefit scientists and engineers in Congressional districts”

You’ve argued that the overall space science funding level is a product of parochial pork-barrel job/vote-buying politics. I would argue that the parochial politics argument is wrong because parochial politics does not determine overall funding levels — it only adds funding for specific projects. Moreover, with very few exceptions, specific missions and projects in the space sciences are selected by representatives of the space science community, not by legislators.

“If all scientists across discipline were poled, I think you’d find that most think far more is spent on space science than is warranted. ,”

You’ve argued that scientists in other broad disciplines, like medicine, would not allocate as much funding to space science if they were involved in the prioritization process. I would argue that’s this is a non-sequitor as space science research does not bear on the questions being asked in these other disciplines (and vice versa). It’s like the exploration versus science argument above — they’re activities undertaken for different reasons.

Again, we as a society fund space science and other astronomical research because we’re curious beings who want to know the answers to questions that can only be satisfied by examining the universe beyond our home planet. That’s why we spend money in this area — not because of some comparative calculation about unrelated spending in medicine or other sciences.

“True, this would be a biased result, in the same way that space scientists think the Space Station budget would better be spent on their projects,”

Again, this kind of argument conflates exploration (ISS) with science (space science). They’re not the same thing, and they serve different purposes — experience (exploration) versus understanding (science).

“science is not, never has been, and probably shouldn’t be the primary reason that people explore”

Here, I think we may be coming into violent agreement — that science and exploration are two distinct activities undertaken for different purposes. I would just add that the converse to your statement also holds true — that exploration is not, never has been, and probably shouldn’t be the primary reason that we conduct scientific research. If it is, then we’ve failed at doing science.

I’ll take another whack at the humans versus robots issue in a separate post, later tonight or tomorrow, and I think this last point will bear heavily in my argument.

FWIW…

Today and for the next couple, maybe few, decades, I think it holds true. But given Moore’s Law and other accelerating forces in computing, communications, intelligence, virtual reality, etc.,

There is something I don’t understand about the majority opinion here, which maybe you can illucidate for me. You tacitly assume that there will be dramatic improvements in the practical application of computing power in the future, but at the same time assume that there will be no comparable improvement in human skills in space. This makes no sense and is almost certainly wrong. Compare what is being done on the Space Station today with what we did on Skylab.

(I think it is easy to make this mistake because we see the dramatic success of getting to Earth’s moon and working in a relatively familiar surface environment in a deep gravity well, and forget that we did very little microgravity work — which is the far more alien, and therefore difficult, task we are learning now.)

Even with a highly efficient and well-funded human space exploration program, the burdens that the human body imposes are very steep, especially when compared to the advantages of silicon and photons.

I still believe that the likely future successes in automation will prove vastly over-estimated (Moore’s Law only applies to processing speed, and says little about applying that speed either to “thought” (software) or “action” (manipulation). After many decades of work, computers can do wonders of computation, but nobody yet allows robots to execute the relatively simple set of tasks (compared to studying life on Mars) of driving a car in traffic, or even studying Antarctic geology beyond roving the surface. Anyone who has used Word’s grammatical features should know that processing speed has little to do with efficient automation of complex, creative processes, even when they are largely rule based — as science on Mars cannot be by definition (since we do not and cannot know the “rules” until we have a great deal of experience there).

At the same time that you vastly over-state what robots can do and underestimate the advantages of human operations, I believe you are overestimating the long-term costs of human operations, once we get to the point where we can do them confidently enough to obtain resources (e.g. Oxygen) on the way. Likewise, because of its extreme expense, the Space Shuttle’s unfortunate history has tilted financial expectations far more against a human role in space than a slower, more rational evolution of the existing Apollo infrastructure would have done.

You advocate studies of all the tradeoffs. I am only advocating that we set aside the Shuttle experience (without forgetting it) and start again from the beginning — look realistically at what human spaceflight really needs to cost (as opposed to what it does cost) and, with reasonable risk taking, what human scientists can do, versus what realistically can be expected out of robotics in the next few decades. While neither of us can prove our case, I think I’m on reasonable ground to argue that the difference is less, and may be far less, than usually assumed. Likewise, the payoff in sending well-equipped scientists on long expeditions is so much higher than sending robots — e.g., a real chance of a real survey of the history of any life on Mars or a real expectation of finding samples of early terrestrial continental crust and fossiles on Earth’s moon — that it is worth foregoing immediate but limited results for a lot of up-front investment.

While your opinion is the default one, and almost universally accepted, it remains almost certainly wrong — or at the very least an extreme over-simplification.

— Donald

Because humans and society at large have needs that go beyond immediate survival. We are a species curious about more than our anatomy, and to guide how we spend the endowment we’ve allotted to satisfying our curiousity, we look to the experts in the relevant fields. That’s the common sense rationale.

The policy rationale that Vannevar Bush made at the conclusion of WWII, the Manhattan Project, and other wartime advances that had their origins in the universities decades earlier was that, properly supported and given adequate rein pursue subjects of interest defined by the experts, the satisfaction of scientific curiosity pays outsized dividends to the taxpayer.

Regardless of rationale — whether we’re just satisfying our innate curiousity or planting the deep seeds for our future American (or worldwide) technological civilization — we come back to the experts in the relevant fields to determine what the key questions are in those fields and what activities are best suited to answering those questions.

“We aren’t spending $1 billion determining whether, at some undetermined date in the past, there may have been standing water on Mars solely because “Mars as a top priority among competing priorities in the same disciplines.”

Partly, yes, we are spending about $600 million per year (not $1 billion) on the Mars Exploration Program because Mars arguably ranks as the highest priority target — for a variety of reasons related to its similarities to Earth, past and potential future habitability, proximity, etc. — for the planetary science community.

The U.S. spends about $4 billion per year on NASA space science, $200 million on NSF astronomy, and smaller amounts in other departments and agencies trying to satisfy our curiousity about the universe beyond Earth. How that money gets allocated to specific missions and projects is driven largely by the rank ordering and recommendations of decadal reviews carried out by panels of experts convened by the National Academies. Although Congressmen do sometimes step up for parochial reasons to protect a mission once it has been selected, assigned, or contracted, by and large, these investments are decided on the basis of their scientific priority and return, not parochial politics or vote-buying jobs. (Thankfully…)

I’ll be the first to admit that there are exceptions to this norm, Mikulski and Stern’s Pluto mission and whatever lunar lander Cramer is slowly earmarking for MSFC being the two most egregious circumventions of the prioritization process in recent memory. But they are only a couple exceptions out of dozens of missions and projects. Hopefully, they will stay that way.

“However, while it is just possible, if unlikely, that we could make that discovery with automated spacecraft, there is zero chance that we will understand the detailed history and evolution of any life on Mars, or rule it out, without the skills we are learning (however inefficiently) on the Space Station.”

Not to rehash old arguments, but this blanket statement depends highly on the timeframe. Today and for the next couple, maybe few, decades, I think it holds true. But given Moore’s Law and other accelerating forces in computing, communications, intelligence, virtual reality, etc., I would not trust that argument out beyond the 2020 or so timeframe. Even with a highly efficient and well-funded human space exploration program, the burdens that the human body imposes are very steep, especially when compared to the advantages of silicon and photons.

And, as I’ve said before, that doesn’t mean that a human space exploration program is not worthy of funding (and lots of argument over the right way to implement it). But it’s very difficult to justify on a scientific basis.

At least in my opinion… FWIW…

I would agree with this politically, but not technically. First of all, if you set aside launch vehicle issues, the actual construction of the Space Station has gone quite well. Even with the array joint problems, there have been far fewer issues than I really expected. Frankly, I am stunned that we got this far without anyone getting killed. . . .

More importantly, no matter how large your modules, at some level you will need to do construction in microgravity if you are going to have an exploratory or industrial future there. I have argued before that I think the development of large launch vehicles, rather than using the EELVs or their equivallent, actually sets us back in the long term by delaying the lessons needed to really operate confidently in microgravity. (In this sense, the Shuttle’s relatively small payload bay may prove an unintended benefit.) While “doing as much as possible on the ground” is cheaper and safer and more reliable in the short term, in the long term our goals should be to “keep it small and cheap” and to “do as much as possible in space.”

Anonymous: The Mars Program is funded, like many basic research programs, because the White House and Congress buy into Vannevar Bush’s argument about the open-ended and unknowable value of that research . . .

. . . and because the relevant science communities identify Mars as a top priority among competing priorities in the same disciplines.

The key word, here, is “relevant.” Why do we spend all these zillions exploring space (however we do it) when medical research costs less and has more immediately relevant results? We aren’t spending $1 billion determining whether, at some undetermined date in the past, there may have been standing water on Mars solely because “Mars as a top priority among competing priorities in the same disciplines.” That may be true for planetary scientists, but it’s a safe bet that it is not true amongst scientsts at large.

if what we think is there with respect to primitive, non-terrestrial life does in fact exist, that discovery would be much more profound than anything done on ISS or the COTS program

I agree with this as far as it goes. However, while it is just possible, if unlikely, that we could make that discovery with automated spacecraft, there is zero chance that we will understand the detailed history and evolution of any life on Mars, or rule it out, without the skills we are learning (however inefficiently) on the Space Station.

— Donald

I disagree. When it comes to Mikulski and many Goddard missions, that may be true. But the California delegation is not nearly as active on JPL’s behalf, not by a longshot, and that’s where most Mars Program dollars get spent.

The Mars Program is funded, like many basic research programs, because the White House and Congress buy into Vannevar Bush’s argument about the open-ended and unknowable value of that research and because the relevant science communities identify Mars as a top priority among competing priorities in the same disciplines.

“This and other skills being learned or on, or given incentive by, the Space Station (e.g., how to grow plants and COTS, respectively) will prove of far greater long-term impact to humanity than any scientific results returned from Mars or anywhere else.”

It depends on what’s found at Mars, but if what we think is there with respect to primitive, non-terrestrial life does in fact exist, that discovery would be much more profound than anything done on ISS or the COTS program. (And I’m a big COTS fan.) It would revolutionize biology, not to mention the impacts to philosophy and religion. It would be to our understanding of life in the universe, its origins, and our relationship to it, what Kepler/Copernicus/Galileo were to our understanding of the structure of our solar system and universe and the place of our home planet within it.

My 2 cents… FWIW…

There is an old truism — that you learn more from your failures, than by your successes.

In that light, we have learned a lot from the ISS and Space Shuttle programs.

Inherently, I don’t have a problem with failing. Lots of quick experiments, and failures, and then quickly trying again is a very good way to approach a new frontier and a new industry.

I do have a problem with each failed experiment taking many tens-of-billions of dollars, and several decades, before trying again.

I do have a problem with NOT learning from our failures; and repeating what we already have attempted (and failed) to do.

– Al

You’re defining with too broad a brush what is “politics.” The issue under discussion was whether or not Congress was meddling with designs, not whether or not programs were being steered to incompetent NASA centers.

That one’s easy — though I don’t expect you to buy it — how to build large and complex structures in the microgravity environment that, outside of Earth’s special case environment, dominates the Universe.

Actually, like the Shuttle, I think we learned a lot more about how not to do it. Of course, it’s just another example of the old saying: there’s no such thing as a thing completely useless–it can always serve as a bad example.