"...Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Brian Greene, and Ira Flatow discuss the politics surrounding space exploration. A lively discussion takes an unexpected turn, resulting in a hilarious, over-the-top encounter between Nye, Tyson, and Greene." That was kinda awesome:
GREAT post! I may have to try to find the full talk. I do believe our human missions outside of Earth's orbit are being justified by a mish mash of claims. The unmanned science missions are being more honestly portrayed, as they are specific to science and have to be justified on those grounds alone. Some of that science is related to other planets, astronomy, cosmology, etc. Some is related to studying Earth - developing data used by agriculture, measuring warming, etc.
My 2 cents... The Moon was basically an accident. JFK needed something showy to one up the Russkies, and the Moon was chosen. But if you didn't live through that era, you prob don't realise that NASA pretty much invented the future. They had a lot of trouble getting a company to make a small computer, they hated the idea, and NASA wound up bribing a company. They developed so much stuff that the taxes generated by the new businesses paid for the cost of Apollo. I've been listening to reactionaries objecting to the cost of NASA all my life. It's been a major economic boost. Anyway, that doesn't answer the implied question. You have to have both. It would be nice to have some fancy explanation, and while there are a lot of things that can be said, we're human. We need to be motivated, or the budget decline of NASA will continue, and we become the Portuguese of Space. The potential in Space is, from a human perspective, infinite. We can mine a lot more gold in the Belt than this planet has ever seen. Running out of Rare Earth elements? I can get you tons of the stuff, and it won't have been mixed by plate tectonics over umpty billion years. Then there are those annoying killer asteroids. You really don't want that bad hair day.
"The Portugese of space"! Yikes! I guess it's true they didn't keep up with the pace of domination of Earth, but it probably had to do with issues other than desire or ability to sail. They had issues at home and enemies on the high seas as I remember. Anyway, the issue of what we do has to come down to the justification for the types of missions, doesn't it? For mining, I'd point out that there are already robotic missions briging back samples from asteroids. And, the problem with asteroids made of gold nuggets is that bringing home the gold would cost more than just mining it here - even if done robotically. If we want to do more mining it isn't clear to me that switching to human miners getting radiated in bulky space suits in nearly 0 gravity is some sort of obvious choice. My bet is that asteroid mining will turn out to be mostly for the purpose of building stuff in space. The reason we don't have the James Webb telescope today is that we tried to build it on earth in one piece such that it could fit in a nose fairing and last through the high stresses of launch. That was an expensive and continuing lesson. Some time in the future maybe we could assembled the parts in space, so they don't have to magically fold into a fairing and live through launch. Instead, stuff in space should be built to specifications having to do with space. Then farther in the future maybe hunks of asteroid could be used to form the needed support structures and other components of stuff we want in space. I just don't see a justification for launching humans beyond Earth's orbit. I think we have to suck it up and realize we're doing it for entertainment. And, I hope to HELL we don't allow it to kill science in space - which it deinitely does have the price tag to accomplish. The vid you posted had people pointing out that NASA's budget is low and sinking. And that's undoubtedly related to the USA view of science - look what we do with education, COVID policy, climate change, etc. In all these areas a population significant enough to have political weight wants us to ignore science and education. Trump's direction so far is to grossly underfund spacemen, expecting NASA to cut scinece in order to support the creation of the spacemen he wants for some totally unknown (and thus totally unjustified) reason. Somone on that pannel (I think Tyson) said something about the benefits of entertaining the masses with spacemen as a way to increase the NASA budget. I don't see it that way at ALL. First, spacemen is fully capable of killing the science budget as pointed out above. Next, CONGRESS allocates the budget, specifying which programs in NASA get money. If congress sees success in entertaining the public with spacemen, why would they then switch to allocate the new found money toward resurrecting the dead scinece programs? Why wouldn't they just pick more spacemen missions to keep people entertained? Inside Earth's orbit we have the ISS - an adequate test platform. We have the Earth sciences missions relating to agriculture, weather, global temperature cross checking, sea level understanding, etc. And they have a science outreach program which gets used in education. I'd like to see Earth orbit used in space based manufcturing of studd we need in space - rather than having to launch products made on Earth. That is, maybe the next James Webb sized telescope could be assembled in space. That would be a huge step forward that would be in line with supporting science missions of all kinds. And, of course then there is science. Besides all that we don't know about each of the types of bodies we see out there, from our moon to the cosmic microwave background radiation, let's remember that there are fundamental problems in physics that cosmologists can study. For example, our various aspects of physics can be used to determine the age of the universe with great accuracy. However, the methods of doing that with our physics today simply don't match - not even within the range of possible error. We have a LOT to learn, with the results quite possibly affecting us on Earth in a serious way. Let's make sure our expenditures on spacemen are NOT allowed to kill our science - that those expenditures are justified in some sort of serious way, with eyes open. I'm not saying no to spacemen - I just want us to KNOW that it is entertainment. And, that there is science that will make a difference.
I'm glad you caught the Portuguese reference. Over the years I've said that maybe a dozen times, I am certain very few understood it. We have a huge lead, but the pace is picking up, and China plans on taking over. From my point of view we have yet another mismatch between what we need to do, and the politics. Support for NASA is a mile wide, and a millimeter deep. To take a concrete example, work on killer asteroids is horribly slow. The first good chance for an impact is in 40 years, and we're behind schedule. Which brings me back to the human angle. NASA needs support, and to be blunt, there is one way to get it. Having said that, I may be about to go off the deep end here, politically. I would like to see our next big project be a station at L5. It would have to be an international effort, and in the current economic climate that's going to be a tough sell. Having a station there will give us a base for everything we will need to do later. For example, there is a chance a rogue asteroid could come at us on an approach that comes from behind the Sun. That would give us days, possibly hours, to respond. Having the resources in orbit, and people to deploy them, could make the difference. It will be a century, or more, before we can mine the asteroids. Mostly it's about developing the technology that can do it. (We won't be sending people out there) I mentioned Rare Earths, we have a limited amount, and our need for the stuff is growing steadily. The advantage to the country that has the stuff, after we run out, will be large.
I like your L5 idea, though again I dont see a reason for it to be manned. The cooperation is good. The location is good in terms of doing science related to all other bodies in the universe. Another use for such a satellite would be as a relay station for deeper space communication. Today, everything we launch to other planets has to carry the capability to communicate wth Earth directly. It might be possible to reduce that requirement on all spacecraft by having a communications station well away from Earth's noise. I doubt the asteroid idea, though. Our capability today would require years for us to launch a capability of defending against an asteroid. What we do today is to detect and then track so we can know if the asteroid will have a near approach in multiple trips around the sun. And, we would have to design a strategy for moing the object. While there are lots of ideas, designing a solution for an asteroid would take years, not days. And, once lauched it would need to get to the asteroid (which can be hard) and then act over some period of time to change its orbit. In fact, we would need to do work to determine the nature of the asteroid, as what we would do for a rock would be different than what we would do for an asteroid that is essentiall a heap of flying gravel. We are doing better at locating asteroids. And, there are emerging strategies, such as haveing an orbiter on the inside of Earth's orbit, looking back away from the sun to detect reflected heat signatures of objects we haven't otherwise seen. We don't need people in space to deploy anything. We sent Casini on an amazingly complex trajectory without spacemen. If a strategy called for having a rocket lying dormant in space somewhere, only to be activated when we see a menacing asteroid, we woul not choose to involve spacemen in doing that, as there is nno reason. I agree that mining asteroids is another activiy that will surely happen, but it is way beyond NASA's planning window and won't require spacemen.
We should develop at least 2 methods, one (prob the tractor) to use when we have the time. But we should also have the ability to deal with an asteroid that catches us by surprise.
Amen. There are a good numbrer of scientists and engineers working on this issue. Our undersanding of asteroids is far from perfec. When we send missions to asteroids it is hard to know how do do such maneuvers as landing on them, as we know little of their composition or surface. Also, we've recently found more repositories of asteroids in the solar system. It turns out that Jupiter and posibly other planets have asteroids that follow along in their orbit . (Possibly at Lagrange points? I don't know.) Some of these have appeared to end up leaving Jupiter, forming a hazzard that doesn't have the asteroid belt as its origin. I'm more excited about this stuff than about spacemen. Plus, NASA does a lot of Earth sciene. And, there are important cosmological objectives, too. Today we have two models of physics - QM and Einstein/gravity. Physicists don't know how/why these don't conincide. One place where these ideas collide is in measuring the age of our universe. What would it mean to us if some new Einstein came up with a version of physics that smoothly incorporates both these models?
Everyone interested in Space has heard of Werner Von Braun. While he was brilliant, his right hand man was the guy that could make rockets fly. Way back in the 1960s, he said that if we didn't build a station (not a dinky thing in LEO) then the Apollo program would be seen as a stunt. I may have forgotten his name, but not those words.
Perhaps gold and other stuff exists on the Moon, and no doubt it is possible to mine this stuff, however, your statement in BOLD above cannot happen. Economically, if you create a huge supply of something, including gold, it drives down the price of gold. There is a minimum gold price at which mining operations on the Moon are economically feasible and/or viable. It's not clear to me that humans will suddenly need 'more gold than this planet has ever seen'? This same scenario applies to all other minerals, etc. that exist on the Moon...
Watching Sputnik fly over at night was quite a cold war experience, I can tell you. It wasn't lost on anyone that it could contain a nuclear warhead just as easily as any of the other crap it carried with it. I do not remember any spaceman related objective beyond Apollo that had a purpose other than just showing that it could be done. Today, I think that's still true - with the possible exception of those who think they can turn Earth orbit into a tourist attraction for all those who want a new way to burn huge amounts of money. But, work on that objective is struggling for obvious reasons.
