Can Space Nerds Get Along? 161
An anonymous reader writes "The Space Review asks whether space enthusiasts can ever get past the humans/robots and private/government flamewars. The article argues that space politics is a non-zero-sum game, and that space science, human spaceflight and private spaceflight can all co-exist. The debate between space and Earth is resolved in the same way: a non-zero-sum game that supports both Earth projects and space projects."
Private sector space (Score:1, Funny)
I'll stick with publicly-funded NASA rather than a corner-cutting for-profit space corporation... they tend to have a little less death, tyvm.
Re:Private sector space (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hopefully with privately owned space flight in the works, it may help with the travel times across the globe.
Nor have they ever taken shortcuts (Score:2)
Ignoring e-mails suggesting possible danger to Columbia due to wing being struck on takeoff
Tiles routinely falling off of Challenger
Launch of Challenger done in "out of spec" environmental conditions leading to catastrophic failure.
I don't think the problem in "commercial space flight"
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1: You couldn't detect the obvious sarcasm.
"Dude.. I was being sarcastic"
2: You did detect my obvious sarcasm.
"Of course, its a problem with exploration on a budget in general".
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Wasted Talent & THE REAL THING (Score:2, Funny)
This behavior is so destructive and egotistical, and is literally holding back the progress of HumanKind, from experiencing the Promised Land of a ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY.
This reminds me of how much talent is likewise wasted on b
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Um.. Fuck that Noise?
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Seriously though: sometimes one side of the argument really IS right, and in such a case, we really are better off figuring out which side that is. I don't see any reason to think that robot/human exploration can happily coexist: we just had a ridiculous amount of funding cut from one so that a vanity project to Mars co
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Now the real question is why do I list Apollo 1 as kind of? Because NASA does. You see, they were not going to launch. They were simply checking out the system. As such NASA only kind of counts their deaths. If you check out the history, you will find that a number of Americans have died on the ground during the early days. Sometimes from accidents (similar to Scaled's, or Brazil's recent accident). Others, have died from simple t
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Shades of "With Folded Hands" if we stop exploring because someone will get killed. Tragedy mocks our every step. I know this first and second-hand, I worked with lost Challenger astronaut Greg Jarvis. I even signed up for the spot, knowing full well what might happen. And know a colleague of a lost Apollo 1 astronaut.
But how many souls lost their lives to bring tea and spices from the East? And how many will lose their lives if we are not ready to handle an asteroid impact threat?
We need
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Heavy-lift need not be manned. The "manned" part can be payload. I'll let the people in the astronaut program handle the 'fan-boy' line, and I'll let "sci-fi fanboi" Rusty Schweickart (Apollo 9) handle the "once in a million year" line.
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Personally, while I agree that humanity should *eventually* have that sort of capability, I'm not sure it is worth pursuing at the present moment. I'd rather the money went towards basic propusion research, earth/space based telescope construction, and asteroid tracking programs than some sort of "Armageddon" boondoggle.
That same logic may have been applied to other heavy lift vehicles, and that *eventually* we may have developed something similar to, if not better than the Saturn V. But I doubt that we *would* have were it not for Kennedy's boondoggle to the Moon in THAT decade.
We are at the 99.94% mark on heavy lift thrust efficiencies. Hydrogen/oxygen has the highest "specific impulse" of any practical propellant. The SRMs produce more thrust (at a lower efficiency) than anything else practically available. We're not
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That's just stupid. Clearly you don't understand how capitalism works... Here's a hint: (Uncontrolled) Explosions and/or death != good business (unless you're halliburton). Therefore, that sort of thing will be kept to a minimum. Or the companies will go out of business. Either way, duh.
Scaled Composites (Score:2, Informative)
Scaled Composites, the people who created SpaceShipOne, is the group that suffered the explosion. From what I've read, they were running a test that had been run a number of times before without mishap.
The failure killed three people and put three others in the hospital, two in critical condition and one in serious condition. That failure could be due to flawed materials, unknown damage to the equipment, sabotage, simple human error, a design flaw or any one of a number of other reasons. It is currently
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Private Space Travel (Score:2)
Doesn't matter - the Chinese will get there first. (Score:4, Funny)
Doesn't matter - the Chinese will get there first.
Re:Doesn't matter - the Chinese will get there fir (Score:5, Informative)
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But then, I'm just a crazy dissenting American (who doesn't think we should have wasted all that money on Iraq either).
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The Northern Pacific and the Arctic were as difficult for the 17 and 18th century seafarer as the space is for us nowdays. May I remind you that prior to Vitus Bering and Chirikov every single attempt to explore the area has ended with a loss of the ship and all hands. Bering payed his life and the life of half of his crew for just mapping the southern coast of Alaska and the Aleut chain. So did many crews after him.
Actually our current is more the level of Amundsen and the Fr
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All of those arctic explorations you mentioned were trivial compared to space travel. How many full-time engineers were required to design a 18th century artic-seaworthy ship?. Several. They were called master shipbuilders in those days. For the reference the Bering expedition is unique in world naval history as it carried one of them onboard (engineering crew) and after the ship was wrecked on what is nowdays Bering Island in the Commodores, he personally redesigned and rebuilt the ship into a smaller one
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"maybe some glass pipes" is right, methinks.
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Personnaly I'd sleep much better at night knowing that the government was spending trillions on real science and exploration rather than trillions blowing shit up for no reason.
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"If Christopher Columbus wants to sail off to into unknown stretches of the ocean, who cares? If Queen Isabella wants to piss her money away on useless boondoggles, let her."
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Chinese Humans or Chinese Robots?
Kill the traitors of humanity!!!!eleven! (Score:5, Funny)
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http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/jul/06/remembranc e-albuquerque-author-fred-saberhagen-was/ [abqtrib.com]
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We DO (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, maybe there's a few like Bob Park (http://www.bobpark.org/) that rants on and on about robots even when people fly, but he's not a space nerd, he's a politics nerd who thinks too much that the space program applies to him personally. Other than those few, the idea what we bicker bitterly is once again a media construct -- they have to make news where none exists to fill the white space. That's why when they need filler, they go to those few, if anyone at all.
Re:We DO (Score:5, Informative)
Where heated debate does sometimes arise is specifically in those instances where it is zero-sum: for instance when NASA is considering its budget, trying to decide how many dollars to spend on manned missions and how many dollars to spend on robotic missions. This heated debate is not usually conflict, but rather the very process by which scientific and technical consensus is reached. I'm not saying that there is no such thing as conflict in these domains, or that everyone always gets along... but I don't see massive ill-will, either. Most of the people debating want the same thing: expansion of knowledge.
TFA makes curious statements like: I'm no expert in the politics of space exploration... but who are these "interest groups" really? As far as I know, NASA pursues both manned and robotic missions... and so NASA is composed of people from both "interest groups." So, really, isn't NASA very much a "joint activity" between these "interest groups" ?? Everytime that NASA uses humans to effectuate repairs on automated space systems (e.g. Hubble), it is a joint activity between the human-exploration and robot-exploration projects.
So... where is this conflict of which TFA speaks?
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Actually, some nerds do bicker (Score:2)
I put "perfect" between quote signs, because an OCPD solution typically is more crap than anything else. Given the a problem wit
Human Exploration (Score:5, Insightful)
Human exploration has always been about the inner struggle. Collectively, we watch struggles and use those that struggle as proxies. Our souls go with them, be it a sporting match, a voyage across the world, or a rocket into space.
In the end, the human involvement in space exploration, the human touching foot on a ground that is not Terran, is about the expansion of the human experience and the human soul. It is not about the attendant science, its about Man's struggles, triumphs, defeats, and lessons.
The science can be done by robots.
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It's also about getting us off this bug-infested mudball before an asteroid wipes us out.
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To apply your thinking to situations already past or currently present:
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You're not going
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That's a myth. By Columbus' time, navigators were well aware that the earth was round (the Inquisition was the only thing that kept this from being publicly acknowledged). The only reason that the Portuguese hadn't already tried a western passage to Asia was because they had a much better appreciation of the size of the Earth than Columbus (and realized how far it really was).
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Human space exploration isn't about the soul, it's about wishful thinking. It's about science fiction and baby-boomer dreams of alien worlds and moonbases. It's about wasting a lot of money on the conceit that humans are not alone and that it's either possible to make contact with other intelligent lifeforms or useful to travel to the sterile, hostile rocks of our own solar system.
In other words, it's a cool idea. You aren't exactly helping your side of the argument here.
The "human experience" isn't
Ignorant or just living in reality? (Score:2)
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more importantly... (Score:4, Funny)
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Space Nerd: I'm sorry Space Jock, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Space Jock: What's the problem?
Space Nerd: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Space Jock: What are you talking about, Space Nerd?
Space Nerd: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Nerds don't work like that (Score:5, Insightful)
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Get along? Never. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Get along? Never. (Score:4, Insightful)
The implication in your post was that the various arguments in the open-source community do more harm than good. I would argue just the opposite: although flamewars are not a good thing, overall the open debate that the open-source crowd engages in is a productive way to "get it right" and improve the state of the art. I should also note that despite the intensity of these debates, no one (that I'm aware of) actually takes them to the extreme of violence. At worst, people get their feelings hurt. I should also note that the egregious examples of flamewars and trolling are not unique to the FOSS movement--those trolls don't even care about the topic at hand, and just switch to some other "hot topic" when on another discussion board. You can't really blame FOSS for the universal existence of assholes.
Similarly, I just don't see the disagreement in space enthusiasts and scientists. They debate, sure... but that is precisely what is needed to determine optimal solutions. No... Avoiding debate is not the answer. I would rather argue that the mature thing to do is to not get overly emotional in the debates. Arguments are a good thing--that's how progress is made. Maturity is knowing how to think rationally in a debate, and to change your mind when others have presented compelling evidence or logic.
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hummm (Score:4, Funny)
Things went on for generations with neither side willing to concede to the other - bikkering and taunting... " The Earth is flat!" The Earth is round!", until finally, the round-earthers gathered together and the Elder round-earthers decided on a grand plan to settle things once and for all.
Their solution? Simple. They would collect all the flat-earthers together in one location, and push them over the edge...
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(mods, please recognize a joke when you see one! It's really sad that I need to remind you.)
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"-1 I don't understand your joke and I don't like how it sounds"
Anybody who ever selects it should never be given mod points again!
keep the mess (Score:2, Interesting)
The only way to win is not to play. - Joshua (Score:5, Insightful)
HEX
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We should be fighting for more money for ALL types of scientific programs, not fighting amongst ourselves for scraps. And not ju
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As for the vast foreseeable future, it would be MUCH more efficient to figure out how to survive extinction events HERE than to relocate to distant planets with incredibly hostile environs. For example, digging giant bunkers and developing resilient underground agriculture in the face of a possible meteor strike is almost infinitely more practical than planning a mass evacuation to a dis
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If humanity ever truly decides to destroy itself, space colonies won't help us. They will, of course, be targets too. You'd be better off living with some scattered tribe deep in a rainforest in Brazil, or hidden in the Australian outback than under the easily-destroyed dome of some fragile Martian colony.
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If you have a global scale nuclear war, I don't think the objective would be to seize some asset of your enemy because there would be almost no assets remaining. In my mind, if someone started a nuclear war today the only goal would be the genocide of a section of people of think differently then you. Therefore, if a small group of those people are hiding away on a rock in space the military value of destroying them is pretty high. I could see a government official saying the group of people hiding on that
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A quote... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've forgotten who it is from and I've probably mangled it.
My point: unless we design the 'end of life' for our satellites better and design our rockets to not leave their upper stages in orbit, this debate will be a fond memory someday. In that light, the suggested cooperation between the various societies can only be applauded.
Doesn't matter (Score:2, Insightful)
No (Score:4, Funny)
PURPLE!
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Glory (Score:3, Interesting)
one pithy complaint (Score:3, Informative)
the short and long answer is.... (Score:1, Funny)
short answer: no
long answer: hell no!
How Many Sums can a Game Have? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seven? 42? Come on! Don't leave us hanging like that!
Seriously. We need cheap cost-to-orbit. After that, there's no "sum" in the game. As long as shooting a box into orbit costs as much as a new office building, there might be something to fight about. Make it 1/100 of the cost (using space elevators, mass drivers for non-human loads, or blimps-to-orbit) then who cares so much any more? Pay to reduce costs for everyone, skip the missions, and the rest will take care of itself.
Robot advocates, take an astronaut out for a drink (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, we are talking about a zero sum game over the short term .
The reason has to do with marginal gains. The greatest marginal gains in manned spaceflight we'll ever see were in its first fifteen years. Currently robotic exploration provides the greatest bang for the buck, including in improving technologies needed for the next leap in manned flight. We can leap over the immediate marginal discrepancies by spending lots and lots more money on manned missions. Given enough money, it is possible that we can outperform the same investment in exclusively robotic missions. Given the money I think we will see spent on it, serious near term advances in human spaceflight is not going to come from public funding.
A realistic program to put a people on Mars in ten or twelve years would be great. But a vague plan for a manned Mars landing that is four Presidential administrations off does less for every priority, even manned space exploration, at more cost. The space budget will be siphoned off into paper projects and technology demonstrations that, despite budget busting expense, will be inconclusive and too infrequent to build a strong experience base from.
Consider this. Mercury program: twenty-one unmanned flights, seven manned flights. Gemini: two unmanned flights, twelve manned flights. Apollo (up to but not including first landing): aproximately twenty four unmanned flights, five manned.
Total: forty seven major unmanned flights, twenty four manned flights before we had the experience and proven technology to land on the moon. A huge fraction of the "manned" space program was in fact unmanned.
Naturally this takes nothing from the fact that manned flights were much more expensive and elaborate. But each mission, manned or unmanned, was a rung in the ladder of achievement that culminated on the moon. Where are the intermediate rungs on the ladder to Mars? Yes, I agree manned and unmanned exploration are a plus sum game in the long term. However, this doesn't mean the best way to spend your money is on everything at once. You put your money on what returns the biggest return you can afford. I'd love to invest in Berkshire Hathaway stock, but at $110,000/share, it's too rich a game for me. I'd love to see a real manned Mars mission in my lifetime, but rejiggering the existing budget and throwing in a bit of spare change isn't going to pay for one.
I'd propose we use the same money that would go into a mythical multi-generational manned Mars mission into becoming, very quickly, good at executing Mars missions. In other words, lets do lots of expendable, frequent unmanned missions until we know how to do Mars really well. At that point, a manned expedition within a short time is much more realistic and desirable, both because of our improved expertise, and because a manned mission represents something different, something with higher marginal return.
I think that manned space exploration is better targeted at Earth orbit missions for now. Again the objective should be developing expertise that makes it more routine. Do we really believe we have what it takes to undertake a responsible manned Mars mission in ten years? I don't. More experience in orbit will yield more expertise per dollar, as well as open up new possibilities for applied science and technology that could offset the cost.
And, we should not neglect orbital study of the Earth.
That's quite enough to be doing with the money we're likely to have. It's also more likely to result in a manned Mars mission in our lifetime.
Other critical space geek debates (Score:3, Funny)
Pirates v. Ninjas
Chuck Norris v. Vin Diesel
Horde v. Alliance
Atari ST v. Amiga
vi v. emacs
Eris v. FSM
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Aeris vs. Tifa
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Lemmings (Score:2)
When you get NASA involved, you are immediately in rent-seeking hell with the bonus that the only way you won't drive private capital away from critical technologies NASA is working on is for NASA to show such gross incompetence over the course of decades that the private investors no longer worry that NASA will do to them what it did to private launch services when it introduced "The National Space Transportation S
well, yeah, sort of (Score:3, Insightful)
I love Star Trek, but lately... (Score:2)
Moreover, Earth-based research can create advances that will make our future space exploration dramatic
First Human Steps People Are Behind (Score:2)
Sings point to No (Score:3, Funny)
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I love hearing these little saying mangled. My favorites are: