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> There were good reasons why people were interested in sending people into space in the early days of space exploration. Before automated systems were sufficie

> There were good reasons why people were interested in sending people into space in the early days of space exploration. Before automated systems were sufficiently developed, manned programs looked like the best choice. But once automated systems became sufficiently advanced, it was clear that they were the way to go. This, and it never ceases to baffle me that there are people who still believe that there is some sort of actual, honest, technical reason to put people into things that go into space.

pfdietz 2y ago
To steelman the argument for human spaceflight: If launch becomes sufficiently cheap, then the cost of supporting humans in space also becomes cheap. The cost of developing space robots doesn't decline nearly as much. At some point, "why not robots in space?" has the answer "because on Earth there are plenty of applications where people are cheaper", and cheap space moves that argument to space as well. Note that this implies the overriding importance of reducing costs vs. just sending people expensively for symbolic reasons. The latter is as idiotic as it has ever been. I seriously doubt NASA as it is currently funded and constructed can deliver this.
- usrbinbash 2y ago
  > The cost of developing space robots doesn't decline nearly as much. Developing Costs wouldn't, but deployment costs would. If launching becomes cheaper, then, sure, I could launch more space toilets and freeze-dried groceries. Or I could use that capacity to launch more and bigger robots, more often and further. Guess which of these two has a better ROI given the many many many limitations humans have once they leave our Planet, compared to robots. It doesn't matter how cheap a launch becomes. I have to support an astronaut with food. They have to exercise or their body breaks down in low gravity. I have to let them sleep. All this is time, payload capacity and energy wasted, that I could instead funnel into more, better, bigger more capable robots. And, finally: I have to bring astronauts back home safely, unless I want to risk a PR desaster (which is not good for funding). Once I am done with the robot, I can just leave it where it is and sell T-Shirts with its silhouette printed on.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    > It doesn't matter how cheap a launch becomes. I have to support an astronaut with food. So, if it were to be as cheap to go into space as to go to St. Louis, sending a person would make no sense because of... food? This makes no sense. Obviously there is some breakpoint at which it would make sense. You can't just handwave and say that universally without doing arithmetic.
    - usrbinbash 2y ago
      > So, if it were to be as cheap to go into space as to go to St. Louis Obviously there is a breakpoint at which the cost differential would no longer matter, I agree. It's just as obvious however, that this breakpoint won't be reached in the near future, or even the forseeable future. It would require a radically new propulsion technology, which, and this is the sad truth, we don't have. The way we launch rockets today has remained pretty much the same for more than half a century: By burning chemicals in a tube. As long as that doesn't change, I can pretty much guarantee that the cost differential between doing space-exploration using humans, and doing it with robotic probes, will not look good for good 'ol humans any time soon.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        Why is it obvious? Starship, if it succeeds, could reduce launch costs per mass by two orders of magnitude over Falcon 9. For the cost of one SLS launch, Starship, if it meets its cost targets, could launch the mass of a nuclear supercarrier into low earth orbit. The cost to LEO would become similar to the cost of transport to the South Pole. You will notice we are not using robots at the South Pole.
        playingonline 2y ago
        It could be that for the sort of work we want to do on the south pole a human in a jacket outperforms our current robots, but for the sort of work we want to do on the moon a robot, or our future robot, will outperform a human in a spacesuit.
- thisaccount546 2y ago
  That’s an argument argument that human spaceflight could, at some point in the future, make sense. Though it’s also likely that automation becomes cheaper in the future. When people are claiming that automation is going to replace many tasks for humans on earth, it’s not much of a stretch to think they would continue to perform better than humans in space, where humans are at a severe disadvantage. We also have to consider what it is that we actually want people to do up there. A lot of people say “A human could do more science on Mars than a rover!” Leaving aside the fact that we could send multiple rovers for the cost and effort of sending a human, and those rovers would be on the planet much longer - “do science” isn’t a goal. Even the current rover missions have questionable usefulness, which is why there’s always a big celebration when they land, or a discussion about how impressive the engineering is, but extremely little discussion about any of the things they’re learning.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    For human spaceflight to be ruled out, automation has to be superior for every worthwhile application of human labor in space, not just some of them. Here on Earth, automation is predicted to increase, but few are predicting it makes human labor useless. I think greatly advanced automation would improve the argument for humans in space, not refute it, by making it easier to support humans in space.
    - usrbinbash 2y ago
      > For human spaceflight to be ruled out, automation has to be superior for every worthwhile application of human labor in space, not just some of them. This is the case right now. There is not a single activity in space exploration right now, that humans can do better than robots. > Here on Earth, automation is predicted to increase, but few are predicting it makes human labor useless. Because here on earth, humans can breathe, eat, drink, piss and poop, without millions of dollars of equipment required to do so.
      - pfdietz 2y ago
        > There is not a single activity in space exploration right now, that humans can do better than robots. This is clearly false. If you mean "there is no activity for which a robot could be developed at great expense to do that activity", then that's closer to the truth, but that cost is part of the argument why humans might still do the activity if launch costs are much lower.
jcranmer 2y ago
There is one benefit to human spaceflight over robotic spaceflight: the human body is a much more adapted tool to unknown situations than robots are. A human hand is a better manipulator than any robotic tool (look up videos of robots trying to turn a doorknob and open a door, e.g.), and our locomotion tends to be well-adapted to adverse terrain. But it is far from clear that such versatility is worth all of the costs of human spaceflight, principally the fact that humans are fragile bags of water that require fine-tuned environmental conditions to operate (and such conditions are difficult to provide in space).
- usrbinbash 2y ago
  > : the human body is a much more adapted tool to unknown situations than robots are. Here on Earth, that is true. Everywhere else however, our body is confined to a bulky, heavy, unwieldy space suit, and has exactly as much range of movement as the air supply allows. And the thing is: We can make better robots. There is clear progress in terms of their capabilities. Not so long ago, [this][1] would only have been possible as CGI, today, it is technical reality. This rapid path to improvement, simply doesn't exist for biological systems. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ

pfdietz 2y ago

To steelman the argument for human spaceflight: If launch becomes sufficiently cheap, then the cost of supporting humans in space also becomes cheap. The cost of developing space robots doesn't decline nearly as much. At some point, "why not robots in space?" has the answer "because on Earth there are plenty of applications where people are cheaper", and cheap space moves that argument to space as well. Note that this implies the overriding importance of reducing costs vs. just sending people expensively for symbolic reasons. The latter is as idiotic as it has ever been. I seriously doubt NASA as it is currently funded and constructed can deliver this.

usrbinbash 2y ago
> The cost of developing space robots doesn't decline nearly as much. Developing Costs wouldn't, but deployment costs would. If launching becomes cheaper, then, sure, I could launch more space toilets and freeze-dried groceries. Or I could use that capacity to launch more and bigger robots, more often and further. Guess which of these two has a better ROI given the many many many limitations humans have once they leave our Planet, compared to robots. It doesn't matter how cheap a launch becomes. I have to support an astronaut with food. They have to exercise or their body breaks down in low gravity. I have to let them sleep. All this is time, payload capacity and energy wasted, that I could instead funnel into more, better, bigger more capable robots. And, finally: I have to bring astronauts back home safely, unless I want to risk a PR desaster (which is not good for funding). Once I am done with the robot, I can just leave it where it is and sell T-Shirts with its silhouette printed on.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  > It doesn't matter how cheap a launch becomes. I have to support an astronaut with food. So, if it were to be as cheap to go into space as to go to St. Louis, sending a person would make no sense because of... food? This makes no sense. Obviously there is some breakpoint at which it would make sense. You can't just handwave and say that universally without doing arithmetic.
  - usrbinbash 2y ago
    > So, if it were to be as cheap to go into space as to go to St. Louis Obviously there is a breakpoint at which the cost differential would no longer matter, I agree. It's just as obvious however, that this breakpoint won't be reached in the near future, or even the forseeable future. It would require a radically new propulsion technology, which, and this is the sad truth, we don't have. The way we launch rockets today has remained pretty much the same for more than half a century: By burning chemicals in a tube. As long as that doesn't change, I can pretty much guarantee that the cost differential between doing space-exploration using humans, and doing it with robotic probes, will not look good for good 'ol humans any time soon.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      Why is it obvious? Starship, if it succeeds, could reduce launch costs per mass by two orders of magnitude over Falcon 9. For the cost of one SLS launch, Starship, if it meets its cost targets, could launch the mass of a nuclear supercarrier into low earth orbit. The cost to LEO would become similar to the cost of transport to the South Pole. You will notice we are not using robots at the South Pole.
      - playingonline 2y ago
        It could be that for the sort of work we want to do on the south pole a human in a jacket outperforms our current robots, but for the sort of work we want to do on the moon a robot, or our future robot, will outperform a human in a spacesuit.
thisaccount546 2y ago
That’s an argument argument that human spaceflight could, at some point in the future, make sense. Though it’s also likely that automation becomes cheaper in the future. When people are claiming that automation is going to replace many tasks for humans on earth, it’s not much of a stretch to think they would continue to perform better than humans in space, where humans are at a severe disadvantage. We also have to consider what it is that we actually want people to do up there. A lot of people say “A human could do more science on Mars than a rover!” Leaving aside the fact that we could send multiple rovers for the cost and effort of sending a human, and those rovers would be on the planet much longer - “do science” isn’t a goal. Even the current rover missions have questionable usefulness, which is why there’s always a big celebration when they land, or a discussion about how impressive the engineering is, but extremely little discussion about any of the things they’re learning.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  For human spaceflight to be ruled out, automation has to be superior for every worthwhile application of human labor in space, not just some of them. Here on Earth, automation is predicted to increase, but few are predicting it makes human labor useless. I think greatly advanced automation would improve the argument for humans in space, not refute it, by making it easier to support humans in space.
  - usrbinbash 2y ago
    > For human spaceflight to be ruled out, automation has to be superior for every worthwhile application of human labor in space, not just some of them. This is the case right now. There is not a single activity in space exploration right now, that humans can do better than robots. > Here on Earth, automation is predicted to increase, but few are predicting it makes human labor useless. Because here on earth, humans can breathe, eat, drink, piss and poop, without millions of dollars of equipment required to do so.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      > There is not a single activity in space exploration right now, that humans can do better than robots. This is clearly false. If you mean "there is no activity for which a robot could be developed at great expense to do that activity", then that's closer to the truth, but that cost is part of the argument why humans might still do the activity if launch costs are much lower.

jcranmer 2y ago

There is one benefit to human spaceflight over robotic spaceflight: the human body is a much more adapted tool to unknown situations than robots are. A human hand is a better manipulator than any robotic tool (look up videos of robots trying to turn a doorknob and open a door, e.g.), and our locomotion tends to be well-adapted to adverse terrain. But it is far from clear that such versatility is worth all of the costs of human spaceflight, principally the fact that humans are fragile bags of water that require fine-tuned environmental conditions to operate (and such conditions are difficult to provide in space).

usrbinbash 2y ago
> : the human body is a much more adapted tool to unknown situations than robots are. Here on Earth, that is true. Everywhere else however, our body is confined to a bulky, heavy, unwieldy space suit, and has exactly as much range of movement as the air supply allows. And the thing is: We can make better robots. There is clear progress in terms of their capabilities. Not so long ago, [this][1] would only have been possible as CGI, today, it is technical reality. This rapid path to improvement, simply doesn't exist for biological systems. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e1_QhJ1EhQ