What do we even need to be sending people into space for? It seems like a lot of savings could be had if we just completely shut down the entire manned space program. Unless there is some direct business case for it, why do it at all? Don't tell me some vague definition of "science". This isn't some new frontier that needs exploring, its well understood at this point. There needs to be a direct benefit to the american tax payer to justify the cost of putting a person up there. I don't see a reason to send people to space, if something needs to be done, it can be automated and sent as an autonomous payload. Sending people to space feels wasteful in the age of robotics, fast data links and autonomous systems. If we can operate a rover on mars, we can do whatever needs to be done in orbit or the moon or deep space, without human aid.
It feels like a vanity and an anachronism to an era from the past. Manned space travel is risky, expensive, environmentally destructive, and for what? For some human being to manually manipulate scientific instruments in orbit that should have been, or could have been automated and get the same results?
Gone are the days where people actually think we could be living in space. From what we know now, not only is it impractical, dangerous, inefficient, its also unhealthy. This isn't a question of some new technology that needs created to support it, it's a limitation of physics and millions of years of evolution on earth.
Send satellites to orbit? Yes. Collect power from space? Yes. Conduct scientific research? Okay. But we don't need to send people to do that anymore. Manned space travel had its place in time, and it no longer makes sense to do it, so lets have the maturity to move on from the past.
You can't have this argument in good faith at the present moment because the institution is under attack not because of a pragmatic reason as you describe but because the joke of a president is mad at a private citizen for their speech. Ignoring all previous Musk love or hate that somebody may have, look at the action that may take place here - the government taking adverse action against a private citizen for their speech.
We can have the pragmatic discussion AFTER the fascism is over.
Most of the benefits of manned space exploration are fake, yes. The incentives of the people doing it though aren't to be honest about it. NASA talks about how critical a constant human presence on the ISS is for ‘science’; never once have I heard them even try to justify $100B spend as more than a keyword.
There are a few real things a manned space program does: showing force in rocket technologies, serving as inspiration in STEM fields, and taking an early step to humans flourishing throughout the universe. There are also real but bad reasons, like NASA bloat is seen as a way to buy voters.
Are you unfamiliar with the many world-changing technologies and inventions that have come about because of the needs and drivers of the human space program? On what basis do you form the belief that we would not continue to develop and benefit from new world-changing innovations despite all historical evidence that says otherwise?
A huge amount of scientific invention is made incidentally to another goal. It's intensely myopic to disregard that.
I was waiting for this comment! What innovations have come about in the last 20 years of the human space program? Everyone always makes this claim but never can name a single one, or brings up unrelated things like the heat tiles on the space shuttle. What kinds of developments could not have been done with autonomous payloads?
Seems from the table of contents, it breaks down to: earth observation, microbiology in microgravity, human health research, inspiring younglings, new physics, and "growing the low-earth economy".
Then broader there's a yearly one called Spinoff that points to the technology transfers, but that's not just from human flight, but from all NASA-funded work.
> What kinds of developments could not have been done with autonomous payloads?
This is very much the wrong question to ask. The question isn't whether something can be done with different payloads. The question is whether something would have been done if not for the drive to send people into constrained environments. Closed loop osmotic water filtration systems would not be so developed without the driving motivation of sustaining life in a box. Sending payloads at all is actually extremely tangential except insofar as if you officially terminate the actual sending of people then the motivation to develop technologies that make it easier to send people vanishes.
It's not super clear from your wording, but it sounds kinda like you want to hear about research within the past 20 years that has made it to already being commercialized, but that would be ignoring the fact that taking decades for research and development done for human spaceflight to get applied to other uses, which it often does, doesn't negate the facts that it often does take longer than that for ventures to reach the public and that the research and development was done for human spaceflight. It seems unlikely that you're looking for older developments that have only been commercialized recently, though I can point you to several, and developments done more recently but not yet commercialized for other uses have no success record yet. It makes your request sound a bit disingenuous.
Not the OP, but I am genuinely completely unaware - I don't follow space tech at all (or really know much about its history). Could you elaborate on some of them?
> This isn't some new frontier that needs exploring, its well understood at this point
This is where I started to think this was trolling and that it would soon devolve into overly satirical commentary to prove the opposite point. I was surprised it didn't do this. I'm very interested in this defeatist mentality, welp we know it's impractical we should stop trying. It's not only ignoring the advancements that manned space exploration has brought but seemingly ignores how advancements are done in general for all of human existence. This mindset would have us living in caves after a few hardships.
You could argue we know enough now but this overestimates how much humans know especially with respect to space
> but this overestimates how much humans know especially with respect to space
Does it? We can't know how many secrets there are out there, maybe there's infinite and maybe there's nothing. It's hard for us to know the opportunity cost until we understand what we're bartering for.
Like, humanity could pool their resources to comprehensively explore the Mariana Trench if we wanted. That's fairly unknown, entirely feasible, and could yield scientific advancement. But it's also expensive, and doesn't guarantee any lucrative returns for us. Maybe there's gold deposits at the bottom of the floor, maybe it's all silt and sand. Maybe we harvest the gold, and discover that humanity has upset a delicate balance that has only survived by us ignoring it.
Iunno, if I was an alien civilization somewhere, I'd be praying to whatever higher powers exist to ensure humanity stays far, far away from me.
You're being downvoted unfairly, because the fact of the matter is that the only science being done in orbit that fundamentally requires humans is research into the effects of microgravity on the human body.
But we know it's bad, and we know the fix: Just simulate gravity by spinning the spacecraft like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or in Interstellar. Easy.
There's this... thing... with NASA that you can recognise once you see it, because you will see it, over and over: Once they find something that the government is willing to fund, they will never stop researching that thing, because to "solve" the problem is to turn the funding tap off.
My favourite example of this phenomenom is water and/or life on Mars. There's been a ludicrous volume of press releases (like clockwork!) about possible life (or water) on Mars. However, notably, not a single mission to Mars has ever included any instrument that could definitively disprove that there is life or water on Mars. To do so would be an instant off-switch for billions in funding, so "oops" these instruments are always omitted.
Send a microscope! A frigging microscope! One! They're not that big or heavy!
Nope, can't do it. That would be the end, you see? Got to keep sending magnetometers, microphones, cameras, stereo cameras, all sorts of things. Just not anything that would accidentally prove that there's nothing to find.
Of course, this entire conversation is off-topic because the topic is not the merit of funding human spaceflight, but the merit of a president suddenly threatening a specific company with losing their federal contracts for criticizing the president.
It feels like a vanity and an anachronism to an era from the past. Manned space travel is risky, expensive, environmentally destructive, and for what? For some human being to manually manipulate scientific instruments in orbit that should have been, or could have been automated and get the same results?
Gone are the days where people actually think we could be living in space. From what we know now, not only is it impractical, dangerous, inefficient, its also unhealthy. This isn't a question of some new technology that needs created to support it, it's a limitation of physics and millions of years of evolution on earth.
Send satellites to orbit? Yes. Collect power from space? Yes. Conduct scientific research? Okay. But we don't need to send people to do that anymore. Manned space travel had its place in time, and it no longer makes sense to do it, so lets have the maturity to move on from the past.