“What is NOT inspiring about sending humans to the Moon and Mars?

The fact that I am not there, and that I have to get excited about someone else doing it. Worse yet, I have to hold them in awe, and treat them like they were God’s gift to humankind.

At least a robot is egalitarian and devoid of egotistical tendencies.

That said, I have no problem with egotists going into space. Some of my best friends ascribe to this view of life. However, I’d expect them to do it on their own nickel.”

First of all, nobody said anything about holding these people in deity-like fashion, you assumed that incorrectly. I don’t get where your “egotists” comment makes any sense at all. By your definition, we should not send astronauts to the Moon or Mars because you cannot go? Since you can’t share the cool toys nobody can have them? If that is your opinion, it’s laughable at best.

Exploration works best when manned and unmanned missions work in conjunction as part of a larger scope to further understanding.

I tried to provide some answers to “how” they (and not just Houston, mind you) have been screwing it up (in perhaps, I admit,excruciatingly excessive detail) in my TSR essay back in Feb 2006…which is the link I provided above. Then, in the second portion the following week (link listed below in Jeff’s original thread addressing this ISDC political discussion), I offered up some very specific ideas (not all mine, and, again, in perhaps too much detail) on how to fix it…with the intention/hope of precipitating more ideas from others more creative than I.

Sadly, while I have seen the slighted wisps of change on NASA’s shuttle/ISS mission coverage with a few public affairs officers (mostly in their tone more than anything), the main presentation of spaceflight across all media (TV, web, etc) remains mind-numbingly bland and un-engaging. Amazing, considering the subject matter. [I know that our society’s long-engendered negative attitudes toward tech & science (or at least engineers & scientists) aren’t helping.]

Perhaps (to move back toward the original thread) with the winds of change coming next year to Washington (no matter who wins, change will come), some of those ideas will find fertile ground in a few critical places.

This is a very interesting turn to the discussion, and I think you have hit the nail on the head. Far too many years ago when I worked for Jane’s Information Group, I did a lot of interviews on both the automated and human sides. Interviewing someone at JPL was almost always a joy: they loved their jobs and their work and their voices dripped with the romance of it all. Interviewing someone in Houston too often was a drudge: someone who had little care or understanding of the romance of what they were doing.

What better story could there be than Apollo-17 astronauts exploring an entire alpine valley with truly dramatic scenery? Complete with that all-American icon, an open-topped automobile. How is this story less exciting than an automated rover exploring a comparable area inar less dramatic scenery in mkore than four excruciatingly long years? How could the Houston folks possibly screw their story up?

The tallest residential tower west of the Mississippi was just built in San Francisco. The Chronicle provided regular interviews with construction engineers, construction workers high in the sky, describing how it was all done and with a great sense of excitement. How is this story more exciting than building the first large structure in the microgravity environment that dominates the Universe, away from Earth’s special case environment? How can Houston possibly screw up that story?

I wish I had answers to these questions.

— Donald

I agree with you there.

I want to hear, see and feel I am a part of the trials and tribulations, the sweat equity earned and the feeling of accomplishment of a job well done.
I like what robots can do, but the humanist in me would rather see accomplishments in space attributed to the human explorerers.

Should robots lead the way and do most of the exploration to make it easier for astronauts to stay at home on the ground until humans are REALLY needed, or should astronauts do the heavy lifting and let robots AUGMENT human eplorations.

Personally, I perfer earning our way there with boots on the ground sweat equity. More human insights are gained, more human experience is gained, more human emotional attachment is gained. I do not recall any ticket tape parades for the lunar landers that went to the moon. How do you get emotionally attached to your toaster?

A good reference for story telling is the Disney IMAX production, “Roving Mars.” This is a fabulous film, and captures the excitement noted by Bob Mahoney. The Although Disney produced the film, all of the footage, interviews and content came from JPL and NASA.

All the other NASA-oriented IMAX films, except perhaps “The Dream is Alive,” have been stale, directionless and presumptive of audience support.

The idea of Disney being intimately tied with NASA story telling has a historical precedent with Von Braun and the early space program. Renewing this relationship would be something that a new Administrator should seriously consider when he/she takes the helm in 2009.

BTW, don’t look to Griffin to do this. As Donald Robertson and others have pointed out many times, robots are incapable of vision and innovative thought.

I had a similar discussion with my brother-in-law once when trying to assess the relative merits of watching spaceflight on TV vs watching football. What was it about football, I asked, that was so appealing that spaceflight didn’t have? He indicated that he had played football back in high school and so could relate to football on TV, but he couldn’t relate to spaceflight since it wasn’t something he had ever participated in himself.

So I asked him if he enjoyed watching Star Wars. Of course he did…but how many light-saber duels had he participated in back in high school?

He (and all of us) enjoyed Star Wars because he/we got caught up with the characters in a good story. NASA (as I’ve tried to say before: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/802/1) has lost the public’s interest because they don’t employ effective story-telling techniques in their communication with the public. THAT was the point of that essay, NOT that NASA TV sucked.

We all know that spaceflight is exciting and interesting, some of us especially so because we’ve had the opportunity to participate in it up close. The way to connect to the public with it is to convey the drama to them through the stories of the people that are doing it…whether it’s the astronauts on top of the rockets (or digging in the dirt) or the folks back on the ground who are figuring out which rocks to go dig up or working out how to fix the broken hardware.

The reason the JPL (and other robotic) folks do a better job with the pictures from the probes than the Houston crowd does dealing with ISS construction is that the robotic folks are still riding on the high, they still sense the drama, that first-time exploration brings, whereas the guys in Houston have been programmed by their management (especially the PAO folks) to PRESENT it all as ho-hum “we’ve got it all under control” day-to-day-job mundane, instead of conveying any of the hundreds of real, human stories that unfold every week across dozens of disciplines that are necessary to make it work at all.

Unless we engage the public with better story-telling using real spaceflight as subject matter, space will remain a marginal issue and will not impact political campaigns in any meaningful way.

I fully agree that over-promising has been a consistant problem for the space advocacy community (although I also recognize that is not the way you meant the above quoted statement!). It took more than ten thousand years to colonize large parts of what is after all our own planet. Were we really going to “storm the Solar System” with all it’s myriad of truly alien worlds in decades?

— Donald

Excellent point. When we replaced the roof on my house, my partner chose the contractor partly by how happy his employees seemed to be at another job site. Her argument was that well-treated, happy emplyees do better work.

Ferris: to continue your crud analogy, the real choice we observers have today is, watching static pictures or watching pictures of the boyfriend in action. It is not clear to me that the latter is less valuable than the former.

— Donald

— Donald