161–170 of 237 posts
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Would you mind elaborating on that first point?
A little tangential but the SLS itself is an attempt to reuse technology off the shuttle... and yet, hundreds of billions later and nothing... the whole concept of technology repurposing is fine on paper... but for some reason NASA can’t even seem to do that right either. It’s a colossal mess...
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Here we go again... Why I remember almost 6 years ago, after the Virgin Galactic crash, when we debated the merits of humans in space. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279 Anyway, I think I lost and people were confident that Virgin Galactic would soon be back. I’ll just repost one of my summary thoughts. The entire thread is worth reading. It’ll probably be repeated in some form today. “ Someone dying is dev…
I mean, we have already been exploring the solar system with machines, for a good while. Humans are much more capable today (and for the foreseeable future) at conducting a wide range of tasks in space than the machines we can currently send up. It could be argued it would be faster to send humans up to build the infrastructure for more humans now (in the near future) than it would be to wait for robotics to get adva…
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The public has no appetite for dead astronauts. It's simply not workable to be so cavalier with astronaut lives, even if the astronauts themselves are willing.
I think you are right, but there is something wrong if we can't handle an astronaut or two for scientific progress yet are more than happy to throw bodies into the middle-east. So I question whether or not it matters what the public thinks in this area. Maybe they can just do the work without making it a spectacle. Then an astronaut dies, it makes news for a bit, and the distracted populace moves on in a week.
Used to be the goal of the stunt was to stand up to the Soviets. Now it would be for... what? Even less. Definitely not worth lives.
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We launch people on rockets every year to the ISS.
The Russians do it for the US. The US hasn't launched any astronaut in almost a decade. SpaceX and ULA have been certified recently to launch astronauts too. But launching to the orbit of the ISS (about 500 km) is very different from launching to lunar orbit (about 400000 km iirc). My money is on SpaceX to land on the moon before 2025, not any government. Not even China.
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> "Someone dying is devastating." But it's not. We're more than happy to throw human lives at most things. Any sufficiently large civilian project (much less anything military) will have a greater-than-zero expected death toll from accidents, on-the-job medical issues, etc. And arguably this is the right way to make the omelette (although we've definitely improved in the past few decades: https://www.forconstructionp…
I think the difference is that most other things have a point other than having a human being in the scene. So if we're building an airport, a crane collapses, and workers die, we mourn and move on. (And hopefully find out what went wrong so that we don't repeat the same mistake.) And the final constructed airport has its uses, so in a morbid way, their deaths were not in vain. On the other hand, there's no other poi…
... and far more inefficiently. I can't find the article right now, but a while back there was a submission on here which argued that sending robots into space instead of humans is a bit of a fallacy. Because the state of robotics and their capabilities is far from what could be achieved by sending a human. There were comparisons like the Apollo astronatus bringing back half a ton of moon rocks whereas Mars probes can only sample tiny amounts of soil. Also one of the Mars rovers (Opportunity? I can't remember the names) in its years of service only covering a few kilometers, something a human could do within a day.
EDIT: It was Opportunity and its mission lasted 15 years. Impressive nonetheless, but boy is it slow ;)
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I mean, we have already been exploring the solar system with machines, for a good while. Humans are much more capable today (and for the foreseeable future) at conducting a wide range of tasks in space than the machines we can currently send up. It could be argued it would be faster to send humans up to build the infrastructure for more humans now (in the near future) than it would be to wait for robotics to get adva…
But what do we get from having humans in space? There is no foreseeable path at the moment to a permanent settlement supporting even hundred people. Sure, we can invest in research in this direction, and in the effects of space on human bodies - we already have the ISS for that. But what could be gained from another human on the moon? What was gained from the first one?
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Did we throw away everything we learned in the apollo program? They won’t be starting from scratch on the design.
Organisation memory perhaps is a better word though not tribal / cultural memory. You can’t write everything done and for an ongoing concern you always have people around. In fact one of the problem is these Organization memory is sometimes in the way and you do not know why or even that exist. But here is about the absence, as it is not an on-going concern.
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Would you mind elaborating on that first point?
I think this is a common problem experienced when documenting the fabrication needs of scientific equipment. I used to work for a lab that had a physicist who worked a lot with magnetometers. A magnetometer is literally just a coil of wire around a solid core. How complex could that be to document? Well he mentioned that there was one alloy that they used for pretty much all of the high precision fluxgate magnetomete…
"Our third goal," Bush said, "is to return to the moon by 2020, as the launching point for missions beyond."
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Would you mind elaborating on that first point?
I think this is a common problem experienced when documenting the fabrication needs of scientific equipment. I used to work for a lab that had a physicist who worked a lot with magnetometers. A magnetometer is literally just a coil of wire around a solid core. How complex could that be to document? Well he mentioned that there was one alloy that they used for pretty much all of the high precision fluxgate magnetomete…