[rented_mule]

The total cost of Curiosity to date is well under 5% of the cost of the recent trip humans took around the moon (something like $3B vs. $90B, or $20 vs. $600 per US taxpayer). Imagine the amount of science that could get done if we gave even half the budget of crewed spaceflight to rover / probe style exploration.

[somenameforme]

The unreasonably high price is because NASA is obligated by Congress to use Boeing and their SLS. It costs orders of magnitude greater than SpaceX for no benefit whatsoever, as a Falcon Heavy could absolutely be fitted for a lunar flyby if desired. Another problem is that rovers are way more limited than most people realize.

The fundamental problem is that moving parts break, so their design/behavior are very limited. For instance Curiosity's drill can only drill to about 6cm, and even then it broke after 16 limited activations. It then took a team of scientists around 2 years to come up with a partially effective workaround. A guy on the scene could have fixed it a few minutes, or done just as effective 'drilling' himself with a spoon. We're literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer.

Another issue is in mobility. That involves lots of moving parts. So Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h) meaning at its average speed it'd take about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area. So you want human feedback on a ~40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. And as might be expected its tires have also broken. So it's contemporary travel time would be even worse.

Imagine trying to dig into all the secrets of Earth by traveling around at 1 mile per year, and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm. And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future.

[HPsquared]

Extremely constrained mass and volume budgets must cause a lot of difficulty. The drill and wheels, say, were engineered right to the limits to make them as compact and light as possible. A drill with twice the mass and size would probably be 10x as effective. Same with the wheels.

[boxfire]

It actually took only 9 months to work around, and the new method is actually quite effective. After fixing some early bugs it’s as effective as the original drill technique.

[somenameforme]

The drill started flaking out in early 2015, completely broke in December 2016, and was back online in May 2018. The new method works but is quite a lot riskier and less stable. Every activation increases the chance of a permanent failure. The same was obviously true before, but you just worsen the risk profile a bit. Of course a worse risk profile with drilling is way better than no drilling!

[noja]

Isn't SpaceX cheaper because NASA exists? Get rid of NASA the price will rocket.

[p_l]

They used a lot of NASA resources to bootstrap, makes sense they later lobbied to destroy them once they could do the expensive testing on their own

[lisper]

The space program is not about science. It has never been about science. Science is just the excuse, the window-dressing. What it's really about is military power and sending money to the right congressional districts. Source: I worked at JPL from 1988 to 2004.

[rented_mule]

I want you to be wrong, but I think you're right. The cost discrepancy I pointed out is evidence of that. I've heard a lot of things that are consistent with what you're saying from one of my closest friends, who happened to work at JPL and Caltech from 1992 to 2011, much of that time on Mars rover related software.

[lisper]

What was your friend's name? If they were working on robotics in that time period we probably worked together.

[rented_mule]

I'm trying to keep this account anonymous so that I'll speak my mind more easily, and she's probably more private than I am, so I don't want to say her name.

Among other things, she worked on mission control software for tracking rover-carrying spacecraft en route to Mars and related ground data systems (I'm probably getting the wording wrong, but that's my outsider understanding of it). Later she worked on software used to analyze interferometer data for exoplanet research on the Caltech side (again, wording?). I'm not aware of her ever being near robotics work.

Part of her shift to Caltech was to try to get to an environment where there was more predictable focus on the science, but a lot of the grant money there was from the same or related budgets as JPL's money, with plenty of strings attached that weren't always pulling in directions she was excited about.

[tjchear]

Presumably a common argument for sending a trained human expert in place of a robot is because a human can exercise much better judgment on what to explore and dive deep into on site, whereas doing so via a rover is subject to high latency and low bandwidth. It’d be really cool if LLM (or any AI for that matter) reaches the level of sophistication of an in the field scientist and we can send them instead of humans for 80% of the results at 10% of the cost.

[foobarbecue]

You'd probably be interested in Curiosity's AEGIS system if you aren't already aware of it.

[thegrim33]

Yes, and Curiosity weighs 899kg, whereas a single SLS launch can put 26,988kg of robots, cargo, and humans into trans-lunar orbit.

[hparadiz]

I get your point but the payload delivered to Mars was 3,893 kg. Entry/descent/landing system: aeroshell + heat shield + parachute + fueled descent stage / sky crane + Fueled Cruise Stage.

[mitthrowaway2]

That sky crane system still blows my mind. Straight out of science fiction.

[contingencies]

Assuming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_crane_(landing_system) can I ask which part of the system did you find most impressive? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1WX0CATyn8

[mitthrowaway2]

Mainly because it's a complex multi-step plan with so many potential failure points, which would already be impressive if executed on Earth but even moreso being executed on a distant planet where the conditions are different enough that it can't be fully tested in advance, and yet despite that the whole scheme worked flawlessly.

But if I had to name a specific part, I'd pick the control system. The skycrane is dangling a heavy rover from a pendulum controlled by rockets. It's unstable in every axis and has tight performance requirements to let the rover down softly and not kick up dust. Just very impressive.

[contingencies]

My understanding was the 20m tether length was designed to avoid dust. More interesting to me were the choice of nylon vs. other polymers, the equal-release multi-line spool design and the choice of cutting the lines on the rover (permanent mission-long mass penalty) vs. skycrane (which is discarded).

[undebuggable]

It worked out. Philae lander with harpoons was comparably complex but mostly failed unfortunately.

[DonHopkins]

The audacity.

[andyjohnson0]

> Curiosity [...] has traveled nearly 37 kilometers, drilled into and sampled 42 different rocks, and as of publication has snapped nearly 763,000 photos.

Without in any way minimising the amazing scientific and engineering achievements of the team and the rover: we need crewed space exploration because people on Mars would be able to do the above in significantly less than thirteen years. Or, to put it another way, would do much more science in the same amount of time.

[Thrymr]

> much more science in the same amount of time.

I'm not convinced by the time argument, as astronauts would have limited time on Mars dictated by orbital mechanics and return schedules, but the bigger problem is cost. You are replying to a comment about how rovers and probes are cost effective; there is no way that crewed exploration could accomplish more science than Mars rovers without orders of magnitude more cost.

[tkcashman]

A manned mission to Mars isn't even on the table yet (sorry, Elon) until we solve several huge problems, including cosmic radiation, landing heavy payloads, and a feasible alternative to chemical propulsion (most likely nuclear, but untested).

[ozim]

Manned mission to Mars is a fad.

But it is important fad just like space mining.

We as humanity have to believe we are not in zero sum game to stay decent…

Unfortunately last years are showing us how ugly it is with rare earth elements, energy etc. It is also showing what you wrote is true. No one really believes that we can affordably space mine for rare earth and no one believes in Martian colonization that would bring tangible benefits.

[RetroTechie]

For anything to become reality, the 1st step is be able to imagine it.

Also a big problem can be attacked by solving a small part of it, see what's left & repeat until remaining bits are easy.

Over time, what used to be 'impossible' becomes easy. What matters is deciding what to focus on for the foreseeable future, and spend resources wisely. See eg.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...

Yeah a human mission to Mars, colonizing the clouds of Venus, asteroid mining or Dyson spheres may not be achievable now (if ever). But exploring the problem space, or having a good look at the required engineering, is. And may be cheap as well.

[somenameforme]

If you held the same logic back towards the beginning of humanity then we'd all still be wandering about the woods poking each other with sticks. Most people don't believe things are possible which is probably some sort of evolutionary thing. A society full of people with their head in the clouds probably wouldn't work so great, but humanity would also stagnate without at least some people looking to the stars.

This could very well be why planned economies seem to struggle with innovation. People being able to devote significant resources to endeavors, that might not make sense to most, is how you get lots of failures, and the occasional revolutionary successes. Do everything by committee and all you get is a shinier version of what you had last year.

[close04]

With the power of hindsight many decisions look obvious. But many others look silly. For every "discovery of the Americas" there were thousands of expeditions that fizzled out in a worthless desert, middle of the ocean, dead end cave.

The argument that "progress always needed bold steps" can lead into dead ends too. Past experience isn't enough to justify future steps without additional evidence. Exploration and learning are always good reasons but if you jump to the "it's good business" step before knowing all you can reasonably know, it's probably a fad. It's shooting in the dark. It could still hit the target, or it could miss. You only really know if something is a fad or not with hindsight.

It's hard to say with certainty today whether Mars is a viable target for colonization in the long term compared to other places like Titan or even the Moon. Before you drill for oil you do a lot of exploratory activities. If those bring back solid positive results then you go for the full blown thing. Before you launch a business you build a business case. Did anyone provide a solid business case and exploratory evidence for why "going for Mars" is the viable future?

As far as I can tell it's not scientists pushing for colonizing Mars. All we have to go on is the push from a man widely known to pump up the value of his own companies (which this would do and then some) by repeatedly making sweeping promises he failed to keep.

[ozim]

You went false dichotomy on this.

I say fad because I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime and I would say 90% it will never happen.

But that 10% possibility of it happening is important or 0.01% of possibility it happens in my lifetime.

It is important that people believe it is more than my numbers. It is important to spend money and work towards that goal.

Because alternative is much more terrifying.

[WalterBright]

It wasn't that long ago that HN had a spirited discussion about how data centers in orbit could not possibly work. But it looks more and more like Musk is going to deliver.

[cucumber3732842]

>No one really believes that we can affordably...

People said that about everything. I wore a $10 silk tie to work today and ate toast with a $1 Avacado on it.

Marco Polo would shit a brick if he saw Interstate 90.

[hugmynutus]

Add to the list that martian dust contains a massive amount of carcinogens meaning any air/dust lock has to be an ISO-6 clean room.

Sure it is a "solved" problem but all the solutions are very heavy.

[gosub100]

This is the first time I've heard of that. What are some of the carcinogens? I know the radiation is bad there, but I didn't know the regolith was toxic.

[peterburkimsher]

Not to mention supplying astronauts with food and managing their waste for 6+ months.

[rented_mule]

And if we're keeping costs proportional, send orders of magnitude more rovers and that helps the time argument for rovers as well.

[baq]

A geologist with a shovel could do 10 years of Curiosity’s science in an hour.

[ianferrel]

For the cost of sending one human there for a week, we could send thousands of robots there for years.

There is no way that human space exploration is ever cost effective with robot space exploration.

[II2II]

Manned missions would still have constraints. In some cases, they would be far greater (e.g. due to the necessity of keeping the astronauts alive). Where there are fewer constraints, it would be intertwined with the cost of sending people to Mars. They may be able to travel faster, but a lot of that is going to be because of a larger energy budget. It is doubtful they could travel further, since there are still going to be limits on how far they could travel (humans need infrastructure). That said, perhaps they could cover a larger area (within a smaller radius) than robots. Risk is also a limiting factor, and it is a far bigger one with people. Humans may be more flexible, but you aren't going to have those romantic scenes of people scaling down steep slopes or spelunking in caves. It could be done, but the chances of something going wrong will inhibit it.

While on the topic of human flexibility, it is important to understand that it will be limited due to the resources available. What we saw on Apollo 13 wasn't the product of people trying to expand beyond the mission objectives with what is on hand, it was a last ditch effort to save the Apollo crew. They could afford to do unintended things with the equipment on hand since the only other option was to admit defeat then let people die. Even the very much fictional The Martian was based upon that premise. Treating it as a thought experiment: the primary response was to terminate the mission and evacuate. The part about the lone survivor on Mars was about ditching every mission objective in the name of survival. It would be very difficult to even create a fictional narrative of a human team going beyond the abilities of a similarly appointed robotic mission without abandoning reality altogether.

[jahnu]

I’m no expert of course but I get the impression that we’re trying to run before we can walk. Many more robotic missions and way more basic research done more scientifically first could quite plausibly get humans there quicker in the end. Reading A City on Mars I found myself thinking this is many orders of magnitude more complicated than Apollo and will take more time.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Can we realistically send humans to Mars plus the return trip? I would maybe believe we can do a one way trip and leave those astronauts to die after snapping some pictures.

[ridgeguy]

I suspect there are substantial numbers of us in our 70's+ who would volunteer. Why not go out having made an amazing contribution?

[adonovan]

I'd be surprised if there's a single person alive who would volunteer for a suicide mission to a miserable cold dark planet and could travel there for nine months in a tin can through a harsh radiation/muscle atrophy/psychological environment and arrive in any condition to conduct useful scientific work.

[WalterBright]

Suppose one had a diagnosis of 1 year to live. Why not expend it doing something great?

[adonovan]

Like enjoying earthly pleasures? The terminally ill do not make good astronauts.

[sl-1]

Can we trust them to enough? If they have a medical emergency (which is quite probable, old people are in risk of all kinds of trouble, even before the harsh environment of spaceships), will the whole mission fail?

We generally have selected the most vigorous military personnel to participate in these types of missions, using old volunteers would be quite a change.

[WalterBright]

I've been excoriated for making that suggestion.

[gwill]

sending a human there also contaminates the planet more, allowing us to learn less.

[WalterBright]

I will never understand that point of view. Mars is a lifeless rock.

[fc417fc802]

As far as we know. As of right now, we are reasonably confident that we haven't contaminated it. So if anything resembling biological byproducts turn up we can say with reasonable confidence that we have discovered evidence of historical life on mars. As soon as a human sets foot there that's no longer the case.

That said, personally I'm in favor of manned missions to as many bodies in the solar system as possible.

[WalterBright]

> As far as we know.

You could argue that forever. When is it time to accept that there isn't any there, and if there is, it is insignificant?

[fc417fc802]

No idea, but presumably that would be after we've explored a fair bit of it. We've barely scratched the surface.

It seems quite plausible that there could be ground water. If that's the case (and I suppose even if it's not) it wouldn't be at all surprising for the cave systems to contain microbial life.

[WalterBright]

Now that JPL has a design, they could crank out dozens of Curiosities and do lots of science with little more money.

[cucumber3732842]

If they actually want to do that they'd need to come up with a design more suited to serial production. Not sure how much modification that would take.

If SpaceX ever credibly gets to the point of preparing to send people to Mars I'd think that that would have to happen because how else do you vet your landing sites.

[WalterBright]

The simple fact that in order to build the first one, you have to build jigs and set up machinery and make a test plan and make test equipment, and debug it means doing a twin would likely be less than 10% of the cost of the original.

[rtkwe]

They'd need to source the plutonium for the RTGs for that and from what I've read that's in pretty precious supply. Though maybe we could start disassembling bombs to source it.

[GuB-42]

There is some science that can only be done with crewed missions, and that studying what happen to people in space! That's already a big part of the experiments done on the ISS.

In addition, people still can do a lot of things that robots can't do, like repairing things, or do it much faster: Apollo did more in a few days than the robotic missions did in months.

So sure, a lot of science could be done by moving crewed mission budgets to robotic missions, but that would be a different kind of science, we would learn more in some aspects and less in others.

[rtkwe]

There's a lot to be said for the flexibility of humans for performing experiments. With someone else or a country broadly sustaining people in space the cost to perform a particular experiment can go down by a lot. Trying to replace people with automated experiments will run up huge costs of designing, building and launching the robotics required to perform that individual experiment that would largely be single use. It'd also be a lot more fragile and prone to failures as well.

[zbendefy]

Maybe we would get a microphone on mars. Just kidding i know air pressure is vastly different, but still it would be cool to listen to ambient sound from there

[boxfire]

Mars 2020 has a microphone. You can probably find audio out there but here’s some:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/soun...

[ceejayoz]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHenFGnixzU

[ccamrobertson]

...and further imagine the science that could be done if we mass manufactured probes rather than using experimental engineering for each one. We could have had dozens of Voyager probes in the outer reaches of our solar system by now.

I would have loved to see more Huygens probes dropped to the surface of Titan or more New Horizons zoom past Pluto.

I don't think human spaceflight is to blame, rather it's what connects taxpayers to space exploration as an inspirational human pursuit. But, I do agree that can be more efficient with how we spend those dollars all around.

[WalterBright]

The JWST space telescope cost $10b. I've been excoriated here by suggesting that a twin could be built probably for $1b.

[ericd]

Seems like we should build at least 11, if it’s 11 for the price of 2. There’s a lot of cosmos to look at.

[fc417fc802]

I think it's better to take a production line approach the way musk did with spacex rockets. That would give us a recurring fixed budget, career stability, and stable pipelines for training and research. It's bound to be far more cost effective and to have more benefits for society as a whole.

There's no good reason not to have a steady stream of space telescopes and rovers being sent out at a rate of once or twice per year.

[m4rtink]

With cost of launch to space finally coming down thanks to SpaceX & reusable rockets in general I would imagine this is how things will go much more often in the future.

Not only mass production but possibly cheaper materials, more in-space prototyping & less expensive ground testing and paper studies before launch.

[My_Name]

That's what they did with Hubble. Of course the CIA bought them to point downwards...

[WalterBright]

I'm sure it took $$$ for the software developed for the JWST, and it would cost $0 to make a copy.

[colechristensen]

The goal is colonization and industrialization of the moon and mars and some asteroids.

There is only so much interest in the surface geology of the other bodies in the solar system.

[zitterbewegung]

Much easier to get a moon mission due to politics .

[downrightmike]

And they scrapped the lunar gateway to piece out the ion thrusters to send to saturn for some reason

[drstewart]

Suddenly HN is very pro automating human jobs with machines because it's cheaper

[bezier-curve]

The moon is probably the only celestial body humans can actually occupy with current technology, for every other object in the solar system we need robots.

[downrightmike]

Just like Hawaii, Islands require massive support and material inputs from the mainland.

The moon is like Napoleon's exile to Saint Helena island, very remote hard to get to.

Mars is like the antarctic, nearly all early explorers died and it take an international effort to stay down there.

[gosub100]

It's not glamorous but I want to see SpaceX do a 6 month antarctic mission to prove they're capable of supporting life on Mars. No assistance from any existing antarctic base, fully self contained.

[fc417fc802]

Rather than a one off mission, why isn't NASA operating a permanent base there along those lines? Locate it reasonably close to mcmurdo so they can get help in an emergency. I realize we have the ISS but there's probably still a lot to be learned about keeping a fully self contained system running in a hostile environment.

[m4rtink]

Any permanent lunar outpost (with maybe the exception of some of the coastal ones) needs to be fully self sufficient during the winter, that is nothing new.

No one is going to go rescue you tracking or flying thousands of kilometers in total darkness, snow storms and ~-80C temperatures.