[bnralt]

While true, it's missing the forest for the trees. NASA spends almost half it's budget on human spaceflight, and there doesn't seem to be any particular goal there beyond "send people into space because we want to send people into space." Meanwhile, a measly 3.5% of the NASA budget is spent on aeronautics.

Yes, the SLS is an inefficient way of performing a mission that NASA shouldn't be performing in the first place, but it's not as if an efficient way of performing a pointless mission is going to get us better results.

[GMoromisato]

This is a common sentiment, but I don't share it.

Crewed spaceflight is no worse and no different than spending money on Hubble, JWST, or the Voyager missions. We pay for those missions because they inspire us. For many, gaining knowledge about the universe is its own reward, even if it doesn't lead to cancer cures or longer-lasting batteries.

In the same way, sending people into space connects us to all those nameless explorers who sailed into the Pacific in rickety boats, or conquered the Americas (the first time) via the Bering ice bridge.

When I think of the Apollo 8 astronauts seeing the Earth from the Moon for the first time, I can almost feel what they felt: awe, perspective, loneliness, and maybe even that primal fear that we all get from being so far from home. I truly cannot wait to watch (and to have my kids watch) astronauts walking on the Moon.

Sure, we can argue about whether we should spend more money on X and less money on Y--that's what democracy is all about. But to say that NASA shouldn't be sending humans into space is, in my mind, missing the forest for the trees.

[dehrmann]

> For many, gaining knowledge about the universe is its own reward

But is putting humans in a low Earth orbit really gaining knowledge about the universe at this point? Surely we've hit the point of diminishing returns by now.

[chippiewill]

SLS isn't about putting humans in low earth orbit

[JuanPosadas]

> Crewed spaceflight is no worse and no different than spending money on Hubble, JWST, or the Voyager missions.

If you ignore the huge difference in efficacy and results, sure.

[GMoromisato]

Ultimately, we spent billions on (e.g.) JWST because it makes us feel good. We're not going to get new cancer cures or end homelessness, right? We're just going to get knowledge about the universe. But why? Why do we need to know the shape of the earliest galaxies? It's not going to improve the GDP. We seek that knowledge only because it makes us feel good to know. That's it.

In the same way, we send humans into space because it makes us feel good. We like to see people strap themselves to a controlled explosion and head out into space to explore.

Just as seeing pictures of the universe makes us feel awe, inspiration, and perspective, seeing humans in space gives us perspective on our beautiful, fragile world, and our role in the universe.

[adammarples]

I think it's a little reductive to say that JWST is little more than pretty pictures that make us feel good. The drive to understand the universe is more important than the desire to see a cool launch mission.

[sgnelson]

It depends on what your definition of "efficacy" and "results" are.

If all you want is to collect data on the cosmos for the sake of pure science, then absolutely human space flight is a waste of money.

If your goal is to inspire, create an atmosphere that instills interest in a space program (of all types, including manned and unmanned), promotes STEM fields, and is a jobs program, then you'd probably find it very useful and cost effective to sink money into a human spaceflight campaign.

Guess which one of those goals is NASA's true mission.

These sorts of conversations so often ignore that NASA is an organization controlled by politicians and is ultimately responsible to them and the US public who elects them. It's not the engineers and scientists employed or using the data that NASA creates. At the end of the day, those politicians want to have their name connected with inspiration, not just data on the water content of mars.

How many kids do you know that say they want to be an unmanned rover on mars when they grow up? How often do you hear JFK saying "We go to the moon, not because it's hard, but because sending rovers is really cheap and we'll get a much better bang for our buck." How often do you hear someone replaying "Surveyor 1 has landed, one small step for a robot, one giant leap for mankind."

You don't. And there's a reason for that.

You don't have to like it, but you also can't ignore that in reality, NASA has goals that are not just about the science.

[kjkjadksj]

We conducted crewed spaceflight in the 1960s because of the state of robotics at the time. To continue with crewed spaceflight today with the present state of robotics is honestly pretty crass in terms of the risk put on human lives. Not to mention the additional resource drain having to build and transport life support systems.

[bnralt]

This is a good point. The government started investing in spaceflight because it was seen as important to defense. In the early 1960's, the best plan for spy satellites were manned space stations (see the planned Manned Orbital Laboratory). But as time progressed, we saw that we were much better off using automated systems for space. Yet we had already started manned missions, so those just kept shambling on, even long after the reason for them no longer existed.

[ajross]

> Crewed spaceflight is no worse and no different than spending money on Hubble, JWST, or the Voyager missions. We pay for those missions because they inspire us.

That's true only in a very strained and tautological sense of "inspire".

Science has quantifiable results. There are facts that we know and theories we've understood (and discarded!) because of telescopes and probes that we would not know had they not flown. Whether that knowledge has value or not is, I guess, subjective. But it's not only "inspiration" except insofar as you declare that the only reason for wanting to know about martian geology or the early universe or whatever is "because it inspires us". Which is to say: you're making a semantic argument, not a profound one.

[josh-sematic]

There are also facts we know and things we’ve built because someone watched a manned space flight as a kid and decided to go work in STEM because it’s just so freaking cool. Discounting “inspiration” on the grounds that it has no immediate, tangible results is pretty shortsighted.

Also if you’re willing to count facts like “details of Martian geology” as potentially valuable, then one can also say that by doing manned space flight we have learned a lot about how to transport humans to space and keep them alive there, no?

[ajross]

I'm not "discounting" "inspiration", I'm saying that the upthread comment only makes sense if you choose the correct definition for "inspiration", which makes the argument sort of specious.

The simple truth is that there are quantifiable justifications for preferring spending finite resources on science instead of manned space flight. The metrics used might be subjective (because at the end of the day everything is subjective), but that doesn't make them merely "inspiration".

Again, what you're doing is playing a semantic trick with words to respond to what is clearly an almost wholely objective opinion held by other people. That doesn't work. You declaring something "inspiration" does nothing to convince me that launching humans into orbit isn't a ridiculous waste of money.

[mannerheim]

Even accepting this premise, there's no reason to pick the most expensive option for manned spaceflight.

The ISS cost $100 billion to launch and assemble (and $3 billion to maintain). Tiangong about $8 billion, reportedly. Mir, some $4-5 billion.

The total project cost of Dragonfly mission to Titan (to be launched in 2027 and landing 2034) is projected to be $1 billion. Even the JWST, which had massive cost overruns, still only cost $10 billion. If the NASA built a Tiangong instead of an ISS, who knows what they could have done with the remaining $90 billion. Maybe for a few billion, they could have sent a probe to Europa to search for life under the ice.

[GMoromisato]

I used the word "inspire" as a short-hand for "benefits which have no practical value".

We agree exactly on this: "Whether that knowledge has value or not is...subjective."

Ultimately, we're talking about whether spending money on X has value. If you agree that the value of both crewed spaceflight and robotic probes is "subjective", then by definition there is no objectively correct answer.

We support Hubble because it yields knowledge, and having knowledge is something that we (as a society) value.

We support crewed spaceflight because we (as a society) value seeing humans explore space.

[ajross]

"We" don't though. Plenty of people like telescopes but not meat cans (not least because you can get like twelve telescope for one meat can at the going rate!), and you can't short-circuit that (subjective) debate by just declaring "inspiration". At some point you need to convince people of a value proposition.

[GMoromisato]

I like both.

And since the US Congress is currently funding both, it's actually you who needs to convince people to stop funding "meat cans". Good luck with that.

[unethical_ban]

I see this argument enough that I will need to make a form response.

Humans should gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably. If we don't work on that now, then when?

We gain understanding of the human body and of numerous technologies through the novelties and challenges of human spaceflight.

The idea of pushing out civilization forward physically through space is an inspiration for engineers and explorers of all kinds. Even if a child doesn't end up being an astronaut, they end up more curious than if we only sent rovers. Because we are human.

It just seems sadly cynical to hear people think "there is no utility to human exploration".

[tzs]

> Humans should gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably. If we don't work on that now, then when?

I'd go farther and say humans must gain the ability to live off this planet sustainably, and eventually out of this solar system, if humanity is to survive long term.

However, just because a problem must be solved for humanity to survive doesn't necessarily mean any effort should be spent now on it.

Sometimes a problem is so far beyond current technology and theory that instead of having your best people spend their lives trying to make tiny advances toward solving it you are better off if they work on things that can actually be solved now, and in a few decades or centuries our general level of technology and theory will have advanced enough that the work that took our best people their whole careers to accomplish will be something that would be a decent homework problem in college.

[kjkjadksj]

Surgery is important but was the work of the medieval surgeon experimenting on corpses really relevant to the modern understanding of medicine? Probably not when they were concerned with the source of the four humors or whatever it was, and had zero concept of germ theory much less cellular biology. We are spending too much money and effort on process that will no doubt be obviated with a future technology. We are still very far from having a sustainable method for human settlement and colonization, and having people poop in bags on the iss probably isn’t advancing much understanding in those technologies beyond what terrestrial experiments and simulation could do.

[inglor_cz]

"Surgery is important but was the work of the medieval surgeon experimenting on corpses really relevant to the modern understanding of medicine?"

It actually sort-of was, because slow aggregation of knowledge about anatomy helped undermine a lot of the old Galenic dogmas.

[svachalek]

Human spaceflight is more or less the marketing budget or loss leader for all the scientific work they do. It gets the public and Congress behind funding the important stuff.

[sitkack]

If that is true, I am not sure it is effective as it was in the past. From my viewpoint, the public doesn’t care much and space flight has been normalized.

[WWLink]

I think you would have to be an incompetent principle investigator if you sent people to space and couldn't figure out a way to maximize scientific knowledge from it. We've been doing that for decades with the ISS and the moon trips and so on.

I have no doubts - even a mars mission where you'd send people to interact with things in person and be able to react instantly and not 45 mins later with whatever the camera and sensors happen to show you.

Now, whether that scientific information is worth the cost? Hard to say. As much as people like criticizing public programs for "pork barrel" this and "bureaucrat red tape" that and whatever.... publicly funded programs are usually run with penny-pinching oversight and angry politicians wanting to get their day of glory by killing programs.

Sometimes the cost of a project goes up when a 3rd party group comes in and intervenes with "can't we do this cheaper?!" lol.

[kjkjadksj]

Just curious, what is something we do on the ISS that actually needs a human hand vs a remotely operated or programmed one? Aside from perhaps studies on the effects of space flight on human health.

[mcny]

> Sometimes the cost of a project goes up when a 3rd party group comes in and intervenes with "can't we do this cheaper?!" lol.

What if we made this third party (I'm guessing blue origin/space x) bear the cost until we have a proven result so they put their money where their mouth is...

They promise USD 1M per engine, they have to deliver at USD 1M per engine. Not a cent more.

[captn3m0]

That's what recent NASA contracts have been - fixed-price, so the third party bears any additional cost of overrun. NASA has strongly advocated for such contracts.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/03/nasas-nelson-competitive-con...

[ClumsyPilot]

> there doesn't seem to be any particular goal there beyond "send people into space because we want to send people into space."

No, we are figuring out - how do you survive in space? How do you take a shit in space? Toilets would constantly break on ISS and it was a huge problem.

And people can get shit done. They are designing robots for mining lunar regolith, but they are all less efficient than a guy with a shovel. You could send 10 dudes to the moon with a shovel and a 3D printer, and they could produce aluminium parts on the moon.

[Mizoguchi]

With China and India successfully launching space missions a permanent human presence in the moon and possibly Mars is a matter of time, likely happening in the next decade. This is critical for both science and national security, anything from future interplanetary exploration, mining and development/testing of new materials.