[DanielBMarkham]

This is about 25 years too late, but good.

The problem here is that NASA is a political agency, not a scientific one. Each year, elected politicians sit down and decide how much they're going to get.

This means the number one rule is don't make us look bad. You can't waste too much money, you can't go making a bunch of controversial statements, and good grief, whatever you do don't have astronauts getting exploded on TV.

The analogy with the mission-centric military was a good one. Unfortunately, as we involve the U.S. military in more and more missions that look highly political, we're going to end up with a badly broken military, for exactly the same reasons.

NASA should have but one mission: lower cost to orbit. If they can reach a 1000-fold reduction in cost to low-earth orbit, a lot of scientific research, exploration, and commercialization can take place.

[jordanb]

NASA is a political organization, but that's why the manned space program exists. It long ago ceased to make sense from a cost/scientific-benefit perspective. Manned flight continues only on the argument that it excites the public and fuels interest in space.

Bearing that in mind, the entire thing is showboating on TV, and it's pretty silly to angst if over this, that, or the other bit of it is compromised by politics.

[VMG]

It amazes me that on a tech site you are getting downvotes for this.

Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. Why a libertarian magazine like reason.com supports human space travel at all is a mystery to me.

[_dps]

I would ask: a waste of money over what time-scale?

I agree that the ROI over the next decade or two seems low. But at some point, if we plan to ever get humans to other planets, we're going to have to do the low ROI slog of figuring out the basics. I don't think we will reach a point where getting people to other planets will suddenly become low-hanging fruit.

So I think the only real options are:

  1) do some low ROI exploratory work to enable higher ROI efforts down the road
  2) never send humans beyond earth orbit (seems short-sighted to me over a 
     century-long timeframe, but who knows)
  3) hope that somehow it will become much cheaper through windfall technology 
     developments in other fields (not impossible, but certainly not one that I 
     would bet on)

[rdl]

It's a waste of tax money, but there are clearly a lot of rich people who would pay for private space tourism.

Going for #3, combined with LEO manned spaceflight on a commercial basis, and then maybe a Mars or Lunar mission privately financed, would be fine with me, even if the same money in government would be more productively spent on aid to the poor or lowering taxes. Let the government spend money on purely scientific missions (with robots or telescopes), and maybe on establishing regulatory frameworks and contracts for specific amounts of space freight to cover government missions.

(If things keep going well technologically, we could have a Mars Direct mission for about 2x the cost of a series of movies about a Mars mission... at that point, it actually becomes worthwhile for private financiers to do it for the media rights.)

[ansible]

I think we're looking at option 3.

With advanced technology, we can modify humans to more easily survive in space. With sufficiently advanced technology, we can just upload them into robot bodies. That will make space missions as cheap as they are now, and without the risk. Because instead of sending up bags of meat that have to be protected from vacuum, radiation, freezing, boiling and dehydration, we can send up AIs or uploaded humans running on rad-hardened processors.

It goes back to the discussions about terra-forming. Is it better to adapt an entire planet (which is big, by the way) to human needs, or is it better to adapt humans to just live in that environment as-is?

Oh, and this sufficiently advanced technology gives you some other side benefits, including practical immortality, so that is worth pursuing by itself.

[Jach]

While I agree that 3 is the most optimal solution in the sense that "all these other problems are solved given 3", we still don't have a firm time frame on it. It could be 1 year, it could be 50 years. (I wouldn't put it at 100 or above personally, barring global catastrophe.) So we do things in parallel and hedge our bets. Could we get a self-sustaining colony on the Moon (or Mars, or somewhere else) within 50 years if we tried? I think we could. And that instantly protects modern humanity from many existential threats while we continue to work on problem #3.

[ansible]

Time frame is always a tough one. Let's try to bracket it with what we know, and be clear about the goal.

First, if we're talking about running an uploaded human-equivalent AI, we've got the processor power for that now, but it takes up a large server room. So I'd say we need to shrink stuff by at least 2 orders of magnitude to launch that into space. With corresponding gains in efficiency. So for that I think we're looking at 10 years at current rates of progress. Tack on another 5 for radiation hardening, because that estimate was based on commercial-grade hardware, which is almost as fragile as meat.

After you have that, it is a small matter of programming :-)

[schiffern]

>3) hope that somehow it will become much cheaper through windfall technology developments in other fields (not impossible, but certainly not one that I would bet on)

Brain uploading. I don't know if Kurzweil's "$1000 computer by 2035" prediction is right, but we'll certainly have it by the end of the century.

Accelerando features a good exploration of this. Your interstellar spaceship is a laser-propelled computer the size of a soda can, with everyone's brains simply uploaded into it.

[JumpCrisscross]

from a scientific standpoint

Agreed. But there are other things being looked at in space in the commercial realm (ranging from tourism to resource extraction to energy generation) that require humans.

There is also an argument for positive externalities. I don't think anyone concretely foresaw the technological developments shot off the side of the Apollo missions. That's not a sufficient justification. But if one has two nations, one pursuing manned space missions and one not, the technological developments will happen in one and not the other. A more cosmopolitan perspective would be if you had two universes, one with a species that did this and another without...

In this entire discussion I'm not bringing up national pride, either, which has real-world significance in terms of how it affects the flow of intellectual talent, i.e. the brain drain.

[arctangent]

> Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint.

It's hard to weigh up the relative merits of spending money on human space travel now over spending (perhaps less) money a few tens or hundred years from now to achieve the same effect.

But if mankind doesn't eventually colonise other planets then we're almost certainly going to be wiped out by a big rock hitting our planet and killing every last one of us.

By the time we spot such a killer rock it would probably be far too late to start thinking about how we might go about travelling in space. We need the ability now, just in case.

[drblast]

What's the point? It's not going to occur in a reasonable amount of time, and if you say, "Well, eventually it will..." then eventually everything that exists will cease to exist anyway.

Why not focus on things that are problems now?

[verroq]

Your argument can be further extended as "what's the point of living when eventually everything will cease to exist anyway".

But ultimately, it's these small wins along the way that help push humanity forward. I'm not going to open the "what's the purpose of life" can of worms but to dismiss scientific research because of how long it will take is a defeatist attitude. You can not predict what fruits will a particular scientific research will be bring just as you cannot predict the future.

[arctangent]

The point is that we don't know exactly when an unpreventable extinction-level event will happen. It makes sense to plan for such an event as early as possible.

[rbanffy]

May I remind you the dinosaurs died because they had neither nukes nor rockets.

Nor telescopes, but that's beyond the point.

Mankind puts all its eggs in one basket. Our odds of survival against planetary catastrophes increase with the number of planets we colonize. The more spread we are, the bigger the chances. The timescales involved are huge but, just like someone wins the lottery every week, I'm willing to bet that, as we discuss, a civilization we know nothing of is being wiped out by an unforeseen catastrophe precisely because all of them lived on top of a single rock.

[bhickey]

Of what comfort would a daydream ark be for the rest of us? There are 6.8 billion of us. What good are my feelings of camaraderie if an impactor happens to snuff most of us out? "Oh boy, I've been blasted to ashes by an inbound comet, but it's all OK because someone else made it out alive."

I also dispute the utility calculus you're performing.

At what cost could we move a sustainable colony elsewhere? What is the probability that we'll all be expunged by a bit of rock zipping around the solar system? Is there another way we could allocate those resources to achieve a better expected outcome?

[CamperBob]

Why not focus on things that are problems now?

Because those problems will never be solved entirely, no matter what we do?

[rbanffy]

> Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint.

It all depends on your kind of science. For an astronomer, manned space travel is pointless. In fact, space travel is pointless unless we invent some kind of FTL propulsion that can actually put a probe close to some interesting phenomena or allow us to look from another direction.

OTOH, a thousand rovers will tell us nothing about how human societies would organize in artificial habitats. A machine cannot tell how it feels to be able to hide Earth from view with your extended hand.

That's what manned space travel is for. It's not to bring back measurements or soil samples. It's to bring back stories that reminds us how extraordinary we can be.

And to inspire us to be extraordinary.

[warfangle]

Human space travel is a waste of money from a capital market sense, perhaps.

Think of all we've learned by putting humans into space. Think of all we'd have to learn to put humans permanently on the moon - from long-term temperature regulation to ecosystem habitats and materials science.

It's not the destination of the journey that matters. It's what we need to figure out in order to get there that does.

[quanticle]

So what, specifically, about space travel would cause us to make those discoveries about temperature regulation and ecosystem habitats? Unless there's something specifically about hard vacuum and freefall that makes it easier to study these topics, they could be more easily and far more cheaply studied on Earth.

[warfangle]

Sorry, I was writing more in context of permanent outposts due to recent political rhetoric.

[gojomo]

Would it be a waste if we were making the coldly rational mission-oriented tradeoffs Zubrin proposes? Or only because treating it as a jobs program and national festival-of-empathy makes manned exploration insanely expensive?

I, personally, am looking forward to a Kickstarter from a credible private team to start work on a space elevator. And I'm only half-joking.

[tobylane]

It made 14x as much for the US economy (including inspiring American children, excluding inspiring other children/nations). Can that sort of success ever be considered a waste over a long enough timeframe?

[yummyfajitas]

Over the short term, that's a great success. But over the long term (e.g., 50 years), it's only a 5.4% return. The S&P or DJIA, for example, had 7% returns over the same timeframe.

(Of course the two are not directly comparable, I'm just pointing out that "14x returns over unspecified timeframe" is a faulty argument.)

[arunbahl]

I think the inspiration point is a great one, if difficult to quantify. The American space program fostered a scientific literacy and pop-culture faith in the pursuit of engineering for surmounting important problems. And despite being a national program in a Cold War context, the success of the Apollo missions was bigger in scope than the US - it was a victory for all humans. We'd do well to cultivate these attitudes again.

[tsotha]

The kind of accounting you need to do to arrive at that 14x figure would get you arrested if you put it in a corporate quarterly report, and anyway it totally ignores lost opportunity costs.

[seagreen]

It's probably just a tribal thing. Libertarians know they'll do better as a group if there are places to run. Unmanned space travel doesn't help from this perspective.

[fennecfoxen]

Eh. Libertarians can be dreamers too. There's a vein of transhumanism and immortality-seeking in certain parts of the movement (which I don't particularly respect, but that's another matter).

But say you're a Libertarian and have some ideas about how society ought to be structured. Meanwhile, society is clearly structured a certain way which (according to your worldview) is not consistent with that (e.g. the US government, undue tax burdens on the private sector, and bureaucracies like NASA) and it's not particularly likely that you're going to see massive restructuring of it in the near future.

Why would that stop you from taking issue with specific irrational policies of those bureaucracies? If space travel (or carbon-reduction or whatever-you-want) is clearly a goal of society, then you might as well try to cope with reality and at least try to make sure they go after that goal as effectively as possible, and limit the damage it's going to do.

[Gormo]

If something provokes interest and generates demand, then there's an economic case for it. Plenty of people want to see manned missions to Mars, etc. as ends in themselves, and this will motivate independent efforts to explore space. We're at the point where political monopolies are a hindrance.

[Cushman]

I think it's the same situation. Our military is geared up to fight yesterday's war; the "wars" we're involved in now could be solved more cost-effectively by literally paying our enemies not to fight. The next real war, if it happens, will be fought almost entirely with semi- and fully-autonomous machines. All of the lessons we've learned will be pointless.

Similarly, NASA is geared up for yesterday's space race. We have to send a man to space! We have to send two men to space! We have to send a man to the moon! Uh, now what... We have to send a man to MARS!

Well, no, we really don't. Yes, we could. We know we could. We wouldn't learn anything significant by doing so that we couldn't learn for much cheaper here on Earth. It would be a massively expensive, complicated and dangerous tourist expedition-- a lot like sending soldiers to the Middle East, actually.

We all already live in space, on the largest, safest, most self-sustaining spaceship any of us can conceive of. The future of space exploration lies in the hands of semi- and fully-autonomous machines. There's no good reason for people to be in space, not for the foreseeable future at least.

[colanderman]

the "wars" we're involved in now could be solved more cost-effectively by literally paying our enemies not to fight.

Thereby creating a nation of people dependent on our aid, who, when we cease sending aid due to budget constraints, will likely decide to start a war anyway. coughNorth Koreacough

Not saying that line of reasoning is totally invalid, but it's definitely not so clear-cut that you can use it in an analogy.

[redthrowaway]

The intervention in Libya cost about $2.7BB[1]. With things heating up in Syria, and the need to further isolate Iran, we could be looking at another "low-intensity" operation there in support of the pro-democracy dissidents. Now, what would be more cost-effective: a similar campaign in Syria, or paying Assad $1BB to fuck off to Venezuela and stay there, and a further $1BB distributed to military commanders to get them to agree to cede power to an elected government? Yes it's dirty, but so is bombing the crap out of Damascus.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_L...

[pemulis]

The total wealth of the Assad regime and their associates is in the hundreds of billions. You would have to pay them several trillion dollars at a minimum, though I doubt even that would be enough to convince them to leave.

[fennecfoxen]

I don't know - you don't necessarily have to compete with the hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth; you just need to be able to compete with the expectations of their wealth after you roll in your tanks and attempt to crush them. This is presumably a lower value, iff you have a credible threat to actually go in there and crush them with your tanks (which takes military expertise, expenditure, and the political will to pull it off).

In the current state of the US, however, the political will for new military action is fairly minimal, for better or for worse.

[redthrowaway]

This is what I'm getting at. If the US wanted to remove Assad, he wouldn't have much of a choice: a life of luxury in exile, or death. I disagree, however, that it would require tanks. They could do the same as they did in Libya, which is far more justifiable and politically expedient. The dissidents in Syria are gearing up for war[1], so the ever-problematic boots on the ground would be unnecessary.

The US would only have to make Assad think it was serious about another Libya in order to give him some serious misgivings. Get NATO to make some rumblings, which would encourage Chavez to issue one of his proclamations against American Imperialism, then make a backroom deal to get Assad out.

At the end of the day, the Bush Doctrine of democracy-at-swordpoint is simply ineffective. There exists, however, the very real possibility of using soft/"firm" power to encourage the outcomes you want.

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/21543538

[huxley]

Citation needed, sounds a bit tinfoily.

Not that I agree with the idea of paying off people, but Syria's total GDP is only about US$60 billion, hard to imagine that it would take "trillions".

[pemulis]

I was going off of a quick Google search of Bashar al-Assad's personal wealth, which led to an MSN article putting it at $112 billion (http://money.ca.msn.com/savings-debt/gallery/dictators-and-t...). Since huge chunks of the economy are controlled by the Assad family and close associates, and have been for decades, I figured that it would be reasonable to assume they had accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars by now.

[cousin_it]

1) How do you convince Assad that the US won't just send some Marines to kill him after he agrees to go to Venezuela? Even if the US president gives some sort of personal guarantee, what stops the next president from violating it?

2) What if the national leader you're trying to pay off believes himself to be a true partiot and refuses to surrender his country to US interests?

[Cushman]

You're gonna need a really strong argument to convince me that, all else being equal, building things is more damaging to a nation than blowing things up.

[dillona]

He's not talking about building things, at least I don't think.

One of the most effective things that has been done to slow down America's middle-eastern conflicts is paying people not to fight. When I say that, I don't mean building schools and hospitals. I mean giving people cash money in exchange for them not shooting our men and women.

[Cushman]

In one sense, yes; in another sense, if I'm paying somebody to not blow up convoys, they're going to do something else. That might as well be building a school.

[retroafroman]

Paying enemies not to fight would probably just result in a lot more enemies who want to get paid all of the sudden.

[billswift]

"Once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane."

Rudyard Kipling

[brudgers]

>"as we involve the U.S. military in more and more missions that look highly political"

From:

  "When in the course of human events,"

through:

  "and that, government of the people, 
   by the people, for the people, 
   shall not perish from the earth,"

and even:

   "We Will, In Fact, Be Greeted As Liberators"

the use of the military for political missions has been more common than for any other purpose.

[redthrowaway]

With the possible exception of economic, although the two are often difficult to distinguish.

[brudgers]

Yes, military missions and economic missions are difficult to distinguish.

[redthrowaway]

Wars undertaken for political purpose vs wars undertaken for economic ones.

[astine]

"as we involve the U.S. military in more and more missions that look highly political"

"War is the continuation of politics by other means." - Carl von Clausewitz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz)

[celoyd]

This passage bewildered me. It’s hard to think of a time when the US military wasn’t comparably involved in politicized missions: see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_milit...

The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are not particularly unusual, and I don’t think they represent a rising trend. That doesn’t mean they’re excusable or inevitable, and they may have important differences from past politicized wars. I’m not apologizing for them, I’m just saying they aren’t a new phenomenon.

[CWuestefeld]

as we involve the U.S. military in more and more missions that look highly political, we're going to end up with a badly broken military, for exactly the same reasons.

<cough> Libya <cough> drones <cough>

Yep, the writing is already on the wall.

[heliodor]

You bring up one factor left out of that calculation of how much an astronaut's life is worth, namely "don't make us look bad". The value of keeping up appearances is very high indeed!