Should NASA go to Mars or back to the Moon?

rosborne979 wrote:

If NASA were to exert itself in a new attempt to land on either Mars or on our Moon, which should it be first?

Neither. Robots do both jobs just fine. Improve them as necessary. Make more variants specialized on more different tasks. Take advantage of mass production to make them cheaper. Then send up them instead of humans.

Humans in space are more trouble than they're worth. They are -- how do I say this in good taste? -- messy. Humans in space are incredibly expensive to keep hydrated, fed, and breathing. It's expensive to get rid of their poop, their pee, and their CO2. Unlike robots, they have to sleep eight hours a day. And their muscles need to exercise all the time lest they fade away.

The major disadvantage of using robots is that they can't deliver postcards of astronauts in front of an American flag on the Moon or Mars. But in my opinion, that's not worth the extra cost. You can send up a lot of robots before you match the cost of flying humans through outer space. And that's what NASA should keep doing: Send up lots of robots.

The major disadvantage of using robots is that it doesn't help you to send humans into space, which is actually the goal.

Brandon9000 wrote:

The major disadvantage of using robots is that it doesn't help you to send humans into space, which is actually the goal.

Is it? I thought the goal was to find out as much as we can about space.

To steal a phrase from Setanta, humans in space are a matter of uttermost indifference to me.

It should be Mars. "We choose to go to the moon, to prove we still can" isn't going to inspire the world that much.

Not sure if it will be, or even should be NASA though.

You can have more then one goal at a time and humans having self supporting settlements off earth is a long term goal at least worth the same as exploring space.

Sad. I guess humanity should have stayed confined to one small area of Africa forever.

Brandon9000 wrote:

Sad. I guess humanity should have stayed confined to one small area of Africa forever.

That's a clever analogy, but I don't think it works. If Lucy, the first human, had had robots at her disposal, she might have launched robotic expeditions to Eurasia to see what it's like out there. The robots would then have come back with information suggesting that Eurasia was a good place for humans to live, as it was evidently a good place for all kinds of other animals to live. Lucy and her family would then have concluded that maybe it was time to send humans to Eurasia. And they would have been correct.

But that's not what we found when we sent probes to the moon and to Mars. Here our intelligence is telling us that these places, much unlike Eurasia, are hostile to human life. There's nothing up there worth moving away from Earth for. So, unlike in the case of our African ancestors, the straightforward conclusion is to explore these places with whatever means give us the most insight for the money. These means probably won't involve humans in space.

Let me rephrase the question slightly.

Let's say a consortium of ridiculously wealthy billionaires decided to pool their resources for a space mission to reach either the Moon or Mars within the next 20 years.
And let's say they have two goals:
1. To make new discoveries which would benefit mankind in some way
2. To usher in a new generation of enthusiasm for space exploration

Which target would you choose?

One Giant Leap to Nowhere
TOM WOLFE
Published: July 18, 2009
WELL, let’s see now ... That was a small step for Neil Armstrong, a giant leap for mankind and a real knee in the groin for NASA.

Apollo ProgramThe American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean " O.K. if I add “godlike”? " quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.
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As a result, the space program has been killing time for 40 years with a series of orbital projects ... Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, the International Space Station and the space shuttle. These programs have required a courage and engineering brilliance comparable to the manned programs that preceded them. But their purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston’s Johnson Space Center " by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to earth. The shuttle program, for example, was actually supposed to appeal to the public by offering orbital tourist rides, only to end in the Challenger disaster, in which the first such passenger, Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, perished.

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Forty years! For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress. They have so many more luscious and appealing projects that could make better use of the close to $10 billion annually the Mars program would require. There is another overture even at this moment, and it does not stand a chance in the teeth of Depression II.

“Why not send robots?” is a common refrain. And once more it is the late Wernher von Braun who comes up with the rejoinder. One of the things he most enjoyed saying was that there is no computerized explorer in the world with more than a tiny fraction of the power of a chemical analog computer known as the human brain, which is easily reproduced by unskilled labor.

Only in human spaceflight do we celebrate the anniversary of an achievement that seems more difficult to repeat than to accomplish the first time. Only in human spaceflight can we find in museums things that most of us in the space business wish we still had today.

The United States spent eight years and $21 billion -- around $150 billion today -- to develop a transportation system to take people to the moon. We then spent less than four years and $4 billion using it, after which we threw it away. Not mothballed, or assigned to caretaker status for possible later use. Destroyed. Just as the Chinese, having explored the world in the early 15th century and found nothing better than what they had at home, burned their fleet of ships.

We gave up the frontier of our time

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Only in human spaceflight do we celebrate the anniversary of an achievement that seems more difficult to repeat than to accomplish the first time. Only in human spaceflight can we find in museums things that most of us in the space business wish we still had today.

The United States spent eight years and $21 billion -- around $150 billion today -- to develop a transportation system to take people to the moon. We then spent less than four years and $4 billion using it, after which we threw it away. Not mothballed, or assigned to caretaker status for possible later use. Destroyed. Just as the Chinese, having explored the world in the early 15th century and found nothing better than what they had at home, burned their fleet of ships.

We gave up the frontier of our time

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/17/AR2009071702019.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Yes, the stupidity of Congress and their ephemeral commitments. We should do it again, but this time systematically, and not as a stunt

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Yes, the stupidity of Congress and their ephemeral commitments. We should do it again, but this time systematically, and not as a stunt

Jesus, you are slow.......Human space flight does not have a constituency strong enough to make it happen. In Washington there is neither the will to get it done, nor the forthright-fullness to admit that we are not going to do it. As a result every few years some dreamers trot out the idea of going into space again, and in the proecess getting neophytes such as yourself all worked up, over something that is not going to happen in the foreseeable future. It gets old.

I guess you're the slow one since I have consistently spoken about what ought to happen and never about what is likely to happen

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I guess you're the slow one since I have consistently spoken about what ought to happen and never about what is likely to happen

Yes, I GET that you are yet another a2k'er who thinks that it is perfectly reasonable and acceptable to tell everyone else what it is that they should want...