Stations a political mess, and technologically a strong singe of what to many buracrats in a kitchen leads to.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s they sent probs all over the solar system, in the 90’s they crashed them more often then not.

NASA cost more and more, was widly seen as nothing but a pork project, and they kept doing less and less. So return to the moon was a put up or shut up – or maybe shut it down. …and the best they could come up with is a really bad Apollo program knock off?? By now private citizens are assembling their own space programs, building their own craft, and openly talking about launching maned missions to Mars in perhaps 10-15 years. At this point the next American to walk on the moon, will very likely be a tourist – not a NASA astronaut.

The human-robotics partnership gets talked about, but historically robots get a standard fraction of what humans get. Its not nASA policy or anything – its just about all politically that can be supported. Likely people figure if weer not going to send anyone there soon – theres not much reason to spend a bunch to hurry a robot there.

Problem is there isn’t a pressing reason urging us to go into space. Contrary to the eternal “we’re all about to die” crowd, who have been assuring folks for centuries that they were going to be the last generation. (The baby boomers seem to have been more successful at this them most – and for far less reason) Earths resounrces are plentiful, which might explain why our biggest shortage is for landfill sites, and the average world standard of living and life expectancy is soaring.

That doesn’t get much press. I mean the fact that this year for the first time in history more of the worlds population suffers from overweight then starvation got a foot note, but pictures of some group starving (usually due to a local war) is world headlines.

However space is loaded with resources of fuel, ore, etc almost beyond imagining. Enough ore to build us huge space stations with thousands of times the surface area of earths continents. Oil enough cover all our continents with seas of it. Etc etc… If we use all that up we could actually start looking at whats on the planets.

As our tech gets better and we get richer, we’ll find more and more use and interest for that. Rule 1 in nature, grow or die. Several low or negatyive growth first world nations are proving it works for civilizations to

> we don’t know if people can survive for long periods in moon or Mars gravity. ==
Not and keep healthy, and yes we know that. Low or zero gs main effect is due to exercize loss. You get the same effects by prolonged forced bed rest, with the same dire effects. Its like being the ultimate couch potato and would take decades off you life.

Course you don’t have to go to the planets, or stay there for years.

Life support?
The Navy has been operating submartins for over half a century that surface only to exchange crews and restock the food supplies. They recycle or produce all the water and air. The use sea water as a source, but you can just recycle the exhaled (and other) water vapor we make from consuming food.

No you don’t get recycled food that way – but you can carry years to decades of food for the weight of a recycling farm.
lindsay
You likely spent you life hearing dire warnings from your elders about how everything is wrong and dieing. They lied! (It’s a baby boomer whinner thing. Your to young to understand.) As a species were healthier, wealthier, with more plentiful resources then ever before, less racial and other conflict etc.

Do you realize the irony of doubting the intelligence of humanity on a internet streaching across the world and beyond to other worlds? Built out of circuits using quantum mechanical principles Even Einstein though.were impossible a half century ago? Where there is free global reconnaissance data of higher precision then the best military sats of 40 years ago?

Randy Campbell! - you get all over the place don’t you?
As to your comments.
> Actually VENUS, (at an altitude of around 70-80km :o) is the
> “most” Earthlike planet in the Solar System :o)
> Sure you need a “Lighter-Than-Air” space station there to stay on,
> but you have 90% Earth gravity and atmospheric pressure, (ok you
> can’t breath it :o) and protection from UV and sun/space radiation,
> and the temperature isn’t too bad, (90s to low 100s) so you
> CAN’T actually say that Mars is the ‘closest’ Earth-like planet :o)
Actually I think there is a altitude where you CAN breath it. Not sure about the smell though? You can terraform it easier then Mars – though what you do about the thin crust that’s making the surface so hot is a question, but that’s easier to deal with then low grav.

Guess Venus is like the original Earth before that Mars sized rock smashed into it and kicked out the moon and the rest.

> The number of people who get space adaptation sickness is closer
> 75% and NASA, the Russians, ESA, and all the astronauts swear
> it doesn’t last over a couple of days and the number of cases that
>last over 24 hours are very rare.
And they found that its worst on folks who are athletes. So the astrounat core tends to have more trouble then the mission specialists.

But hell – The North Atlantic Liners had more trouble with it I guess.

You WAY over thinking the life support issue. That’s why Bio-sphere 2 was such a disaster. They were thinking to ecologically. Thinking they had to nuild a full complex biosphere. We don’t do that in cities and fars here. No reason we would do that in space? Veruy good reasons of safty and reliability that we wouldn’t!

Will a Mars or space colony be full close cycle completely sef suficent? Nope. Neiather is New York (or the country), but folks have been living there for a long time.

>… How about the question of the toxicity of the Martian soil?
> Again using analogs we ….

Ah, we don’t have a good chemical analisis of whats in the Mars soil dissolving organic matieral. So we can’t be sure how good or analogs are?

True that with power you can decompose materials back into raw elements – but..

> What about those manufacturing process’? Won’t that need a
> huge high-tech base to support? High-Tech yes, ‘huge’ not at all,
> we currently have several ways of fabricating replacement parts
> including ‘printing’ them atom by atom or other rapid prototyping process.

No that kind of operation requires a pretty heavy supply chain of support infrastructure – and the atom by atom parts are little more then lab toys. No nanotech replicators yet.

So Colonies in space are dependant on the big civilizations of earth, just like each nation depends on something from some of the others.

> Lastly let me say this; The ISS can’t provide the platform to do
> more than perform simple tests or very small experiments with
> any of these processes.’ It just does not have the designed capacity
> to do anything more and never will.—

True. It was built only as a political showpiece so funds were only authorized for enough to build it and keep it minimaslly operating. Not enough to actually do anything with it.

==

> Lindsay; to put it bluntly because I think you and your friends
> can handle the truth, your absolutely correct. The Earth IS doomed,
> this doom is inevitable and impossible to avoid no matter
> what methods humans try to forestall or avoid this doom. None
> of it will matter because the Earth will be consumed in the fires
> of its home star as that star expands to become a Red Giant sun,
> we may only have a few billion years. ===

Geez man, give the girl a heart attack!! Its not like the sun dieing in 4 billion is a pressing problem for a 200,000 year oold species!!

> == Or we could have only a few moments after you read this
> post. The Dinosaurs died because they didn’t have a space
> program. Without one they were unable to take any action
> but to watch the huge fireball that killed them when an asteroid
> slammed into the Earth. We can easily suffer the same fate as
> we KNOW there are Near-Earth Objects out there we haven’t
> found yet with the pittance we spend searching for them now.==

Ok, point here. We usually find them as they swep past the Earth, or in many cases HIT IT!!

Did you know recon sats see a Meteor caused A bomb sized blast a month and a H bomb sized blast a year? Hardly ever in a civilized area, and almost always to high up in the air to hurt anyone. But then folks wonder why 4 major fire occurred the same night as the great Chicago fire across the Midwest. And if whatever Caused Tunguska had hit a few hours earlier it would have trashed a eouro country of so.

We really should track these all down and shove troublesome ones out of our planets way.

> Challenges? Oh you probably don’t even realize how precarious
> life on Earth is. Global warming worrying you? Perhaps it
> should, but without a robust space program that looks outward
> instead of just inward we might have ‘just’ assumed that humans
> caused it instead of finally verifying that our sun IS a variable
> star, and that its output has been increasing since the late middle ages. ==

NASA got seriously on Gores S**t list for pointing things like that out in the press. Little things like 3 other planets and moons in the solar system are having simultaneous climate shifts with Earths. (Mars Jupiter, and do you remember which Jovian moon?) I amazed by the demonic evil powers folks credit Bush and car companies with, but I don’t care how many suvs and republicans we have on earth, they did not melt Mars poles and shift Jupiter’s bands polar!
[No, I’m sorry, It really won’t go away if we all sign Kyoto and drive a Preis!!]

Oh, on the good news side, last time we got this warm (a couple degrees warmer actually) from 1000 ad to 1500ad was a great surge in human civilization. [The records show the French were whining about cheep imported wine from England and Scotland were spoiling there market. --- Have the French always been whinners??]

> Worried that because NASA is going to stop observing the
> Earth we’ll be caught by surprise by other changes we may miss?
> Bit of a news flash, but Earth resource and data collection from
> orbit has been a money making endeavor for the last 10 years
> and the coverage is expanding. NASA, the ESA, and most
> commercial that need data now BUY it from private providers
> who loft their own Earth monitoring satellites. ==

Yeah NASA has LOOOONG been a also ran in Earth and climat sats. But theirs good PR in a mission to earth” sat to study climate chance – so as long as they keep the results out of the headlines (what it really got cooler from WW-II to the ‘70’s? and really going no where the last 20 years?) it’s a good way to get budget money.

>== my name is Randy Campbell and I’m 46. (Mentally around 13
> according to my wife, but I beg that you take that assessment
> with a grain of salt as there is a good possibility she may be
> iased on the matter :o) —

Ok, that’s just to easy – it must be a trap.

I’m Kelly Starks a 50 ? year old aerospace engineer and exNASA contractor – if we’re into backgrounds.

>.. I’ve not ’stopped’ trying to save the world…

Can’t see why your trying to save the world – its been trying to kill you for 46 years now.

If you want to save the world, first get past the political posturing and sound bytes and find out whats really happening and why, not what crap a politician or cuase leader is using to con you.

Micheal Moore was asked about how his movies are almost complete false and staged by Moore. He answered that “its not important if what I say is true, as long as it convinces folks to do whats right..”

If you buy that, don’t try to save the world, you’ll do more harm then good.

Want to strike a major blow against air and other pollution? Ignore eco groups and renewable BS systems. Go to http://www.emc2fusion.org/ and give Bussard enough money to get his WORKING fusion reactor from lab prototype built under the Navy contract, up to a full commercial product.

Want to feed the hungry – Ban ethonaol and build a UN that stands up to despots and warlords that burn crops and food convoys to weaken enemies. (World food production has outpaced world population growth since the civil war!)

Want to stop species extinction? Do you know how many known actual species have gone extinct in the last couple centuries? 2! Dodo and Carrior pigion. Past that is all hand waving about likely spies we never knew existed, or redefining whats a species.

[Did you know the Northern Califiornia spotted owl ISN’T a species? Just the spotted Owls in northern Cal (oh and they are doing fine, they thrive in areas THAT AER HEAVILY LOGGED!! A birds got to see wats on the ground to grab and eat it you know. Hard in dence old growth parks and preserves.)

Want to stop climate change …. You’r on a planet idiot! The climates are always changing. Cope or stay inside all the time.

>== I dug into issues as they came into focus for me and found that
> many times ‘conventional’ wisdom was based on false or outdated
> assumptions, what surprised me most though was that often
> the ‘un-conventional’ wisdom that I embraced in my efforts was
> often ALSO based on such shakey ground. ===

Its not what we don’t know that hurts us – its what we know to be true, that isn’t, that really hurts us”.

The most important resource really is free educated people. Ones able to build whatever they want. But that means you don’t have a right to make the rest of the world do what you want either.

>== ALWAYS ensure you look at BOTH side of an issue as completely
> as possible when taking up the fight. ==

And sometimes assuming the exact opposite of a popular unchallenged assumption can be a very informative point of view to try out on issues.

> == when the last human dies, so dies Hitler, Stalin, and
> Jeffery Dahlmer, but so does Picaso, Nelson Mandela, and
> Lincoln. Each of us embodies the best as well as the worst
> features of the beings we call humans ==

Yeah this “humans are a desease infesting the universe is so disgustingly pathetic. Its about as well founded as the “well the ‘other’ races [every races has a list of ‘others’] are all just inferior” mindset. We’ve made everything from skyscrapers, to Dogs, to sonnets, to porn, stupid TV, to mass food production, medicine to dramatically extend our life expectancy, weapons able to melt a city – or destroy as attacking asteroid or power a starship. Vehicles to carry up to the far corners and depths of the world – out to the edges of the solar system – and cable networks to send everyone back video so they can see to. Technology to power the dreams of the world – including psycho religious nuts and dictators. And we literally just starting.

No other species or group of species, on this rock can claim even a fraction of that.

Not bad for a few centuries of civilization.

Foul! I call Foul, there David! :o)

Actually VENUS, (at an altitude of around 70-80km :o) is the “most” Earthlike planet in the Solar System :o)

Sure you need a “Lighter-Than-Air” space station there to stay on, but you have 90% Earth gravity and atmospheric pressure, (ok you can’t breath it :o) and protection from UV and sun/space radiation, and the temperature isn’t too bad, (90s to low 100s) so you CAN’T actually say that Mars is the ‘closest’ Earth-like planet :o)

You also wrote:
>By the way, a trip into Earth orbit is like getting a bad flu.
>Half of all astronauts puke their brains out for a day or a week after
>they reach orbit, and then puke their brains out after they return to
>Earth.

Ok, might there be a ‘little’ exaggeration here? The number of people who get space adaptation sickness is closer to 75% and NASA, the Russians, ESA, and all the astronauts swear it doesn’t last over a couple of days and the number of cases that last over 24 hours are very rare.
You saying all these folks are lying? If so this is important news, because a lot of what has been proposed for such things as orbital tourism and experimentation are ‘assuming’ that SAS isn’t as bad as you say it is. Which version is right?

>An example of a technology we’ll need to develop to send humans out of
>low-Earth orbit is advanced life support. Basically, that’s about
>recycling everything we can. If we tried to do a Mars expedition with the
>life support technology we use on the International Space Station, we’d
>need to send along many tons of water, air, food, etc., etc. That’s just
>not practical, given foreseeable launch costs.

“Advanced” life support research has been on-going for decades, to get a ‘bit’ snooty about it, you have to look “beyond” the launch pad and get over the “if it ain’t done in a government sponsored lab, it ain’t real science” altitude that seem to permeate a lot of folks views on space research :o)

You see we have spent a good portion of the last 30 years doing “Advanced” life support research, most of it by people who could care less about the space program or manned space flight. On the ‘gripping’ hand, the REASON we know so much about said ‘research’ at all is, again, those ‘fanatical’ L5-er types because they were the first “space” cadets who looked beyond ‘just’ technology to solve the problems related to human space flight. They were the first ‘techies’ who looked to natural systems and process’ to reduce the supply needs of humans in space, and as a “by-product” (spin-off? :o) they also found common ground for dialog with the Ecological movement and the counter-culture/alternate living folks, allowing the rest of us ‘techies’ access to mounds of data on alternate and more ‘efficient’ ways to attack the problems of long-term spaceflight.

So for ‘advanced’ life support ‘ideas’ NASA has finally turned back the pages to research ways of providing for living in space and ways to recycle as much as possible through less ‘equipment’ intensive methods. Stuff that the “Eco/Alternate” folks have known and worked with for decades, and have perfected to a high degree. Now is this stuff ‘plug-and-play’ for use in space? Of course not, who’s had a chance to try any of this stuff on actual space flights with the flights so heavily restricted and so few?

But it doesn’t mean the ‘means’ are not there, just that more work needs to be done, but not as much ‘work’ as one would think. Need to recycle air? Plants due this intensively, but they need to be watered and fertilized, guess what humans produce an abundance of :o)
(Some more than others of course :o)
Lunar soil (chemical analogs actually) doesn’t provide any nutrients for plants but makes a very adaptable ‘base’ for growing them. How about the question of the toxicity of the Martian soil? Again using analogs we (almost by accident) have found out that human, er… semi-solid waste products, neutralize the toxic portions and actually turn it into pretty good ’soil’ over time, as well as ‘recycling’ the waste. In addition other ‘areas’ of science and technology are being ‘discovered’ to have already addressed some aspects of the problem of long term living in space by looking for and finding ways to deal with similar problems here on Earth. As long as you look beyond the ‘usual’ sources you’ll be surprised at how ‘prepared’ we can be for living on un-hospitable worlds or in space itself.
One problem has been what to do with the massive amounts of ’solid’ waste that would be amassed over the long term such as plastics, ‘toxic’ wastes, and metals. Strangely enough we know how to take most of these items and ‘re-make’ them into hydrocarbons (oil) and separate out all the ‘other’ elements during the process very efficiently. Thermal Depolymerization would even work to de-tox Martian soil. With access to high levels of solar power, and using the recent much less ‘power’ hungry plasma incinerator technology and adjustable magnetic fields we can ‘transform’ any material into its constituent elements and then separate them into pure forms ready to go back to the manufacturing process.
What about those manufacturing process’? Won’t that need a huge high-tech base to support? High-Tech yes, ‘huge’ not at all, we currently have several ways of fabricating replacement parts including ‘printing’ them atom by atom or other rapid prototyping process.

Lastly let me say this; The ISS can’t provide the platform to do more than perform simple tests or very small experiments with any of these processes.’ It just does not have the designed capacity to do anything more and never will. This is a planning and budget shortfall that is inherent in the program, and the ‘reason’ we have the ISS and not Space Station Alpha. It is also the only Space Station that Congress was going to fund, just like the Shuttle is the only ’spaceship’ as it is that they would fund.
Neither of these will ever be enough to actualize the needed innovations, testing and research that will make mans presence beyond Earth truly possible. Without larger scale access to space, without more platforms in Earth orbit to carry out the experiments needed, we won’t be able to do enough to get beyond our current ‘exploration’ phase. (Which is actually less than easy and more expensive than exploring the deep ocean.)

Lindsay wrote:
>This discussion has been very interesting, but I still don’t understand
>why humans settling the solar system is inevitable. It just doesn’t make
>sense to me. To me, spaceflight seems like an expensive diversion, from
>the challenges actually facing our planet.

Lindsay; to put it bluntly because I think you and your friends can handle the truth, your absolutely correct. The Earth IS doomed, this doom is inevitable and impossible to avoid no matter what methods humans try to forestall or avoid this doom. None of it will matter because the Earth will be consumed in the fires of its home star as that star expands to become a Red Giant sun, we may only have a few billion years. Or we could have only a few moments after you read this post. The Dinosaurs died because they didn’t have a space program. Without one they were unable to take any action but to watch the huge fireball that killed them when an asteroid slammed into the Earth. We can easily suffer the same fate as we KNOW there are Near-Earth Objects out there we haven’t found yet with the pittance we spend searching for them now.
Challenges? Oh you probably don’t even realize how precarious life on Earth is. Global warming worrying you? Perhaps it should, but without a robust space program that looks outward instead of just inward we might have ‘just’ assumed that humans caused it instead of finally verifying that our sun IS a variable star, and that its output has been increasing since the late middle ages. We might even have missed the fact that its output had stabilized over the last few years and missed the data that is showing what might be the beginning of a decline.

Is global hunger and poverty a Challenge that deserves attention more than spaceflight? (Just to take one example)
No, probably not since the ‘challenge’ has always been transportation rather than capacity. There is plenty of food to go around, but it is almost impossible to get it to the ones who need it fast enough to do them any good. Add in sovereign states, governments, or just simply groups of powerful people who would rather others didn’t actually GET the food and the Challenge becomes quite large. But compared to what is already spent on addressing this challenge already the entirety of the budget for ’spaceflight’ is not even enough to make up for the ‘wasted’ monies that are paid as ‘bribes’ to the above groups to allow what food get through.
This is not something that money will solve, no matter how much is thrown at the problem. It is a social issue.

Worried that because NASA is going to stop observing the Earth we’ll be caught by surprise by other changes we may miss? Bit of a news flash, but Earth resource and data collection from orbit has been a money making endeavor for the last 10 years and the coverage is expanding. NASA, the ESA, and most commercial that need data now BUY it from private providers who loft their own Earth monitoring satellites. (The ‘down-side’ being so do people with less than friendly intentions :o)

I’ll let you in on a well un-kept secret :o)
“It” is not a ‘generational’ thing…. it’s an ‘age’ thing, among other reasons.

Your profile says 22, hi, my name is Randy Campbell and I’m 46. (Mentally around 13 according to my wife, but I beg that you take that assessment with a grain of salt as there is a good possibility she may be biased on the matter :o)

I’ve not ’stopped’ trying to save the world since my first realization that some things in the world weren’t ‘right’ and it was one of my jobs to MAKE things right for those that came after me.
My methods and focus’ have changed but not the basic nature of my NEED to do something. I dug into issues as they came into focus for me and found that many times ‘conventional’ wisdom was based on false or outdated assumptions, what surprised me most though was that often the ‘un-conventional’ wisdom that I embraced in my efforts was often ALSO based on such shakey ground. Often times the dread word of ‘compromise’ and the idea of making a ‘deal’ to at least get the side to talking on solutions, REAL solutions, turned out to be the biggest ‘challenge’ of all, and the hardest one to face.

I don’t know anything (well not much really I should say considering you DO have a blog :o) about you and your friends beliefs, passions, and concerns, but I can make a prediction on them; 20 years from now most of them won’t be the same.

Some advice, if I may, (it’s ‘free’ so take it for what it’s worth in any case and the spirit in which it is offered :o) fight for our concerns, embrace your passions, and always believe, but in doing so ALWAYS ensure you look at BOTH side of an issue as completely as possible when taking up the fight. You might not agree with, like, or even believe what the ‘other’ side is about, but until and unless SOMEONE takes that step to both understand those stances, and the viewpoint they come from compromise is impossible, and long range solutions that actually SOLVE anything are rare.

Humans’ moving out into the Universe at large is either ‘inevitable’ or we are totally doomed as a species and a ‘promise’ as a life form.
For when the last human dies, so dies Hitler, Stalin, and Jeffery Dahlmer, but so does Picaso, Nelson Mandela, and Lincoln. Each of us embodies the best as well as the worst features of the beings we call humans and we each have to decide which of those sides will be remembered, but we always have to keep in mind that for all we can tell with all the data we have at the current moment is that WE are IT. The ONE, the ONLY species that has the capability to leave their home planet and move out into the Universe. The only life form we KNOW has the ability to go from a fore-doomed species inevitably to go extinct when its home world/sun/galaxy finally dies to a species ‘immortality’ by moving outward into the vastness of space and time itself.

Are we ‘worthy’ of such? I can’t really answer that, because my personal feelings are optimistic, therefore my ‘outlook’ is inclined towards thinking that our ‘good’ will always out weigh out ‘evil’ and that we as species are worth saving and protecting. Your mileage will probably vary, but that is the basic ‘choice’ of the matter.

Do we stand and ‘fight’ the good fight to raise ourselves and our species to the Challenges before us and survive as a race as we move outward over the millennia? Or do we realize that nothing we do will matter in the long run because we inevitably doomed as a species as our world is destroyed by our inevitable solar immolation, and any good we do as well as evil will be lost for all time, spread as cosmic ash over our racial grave site?

Then again, that’s what life is all about isn’t it? Choices and what we make of them.

Randy Campbell

Very nice job. I’m sorry I didn’t read it earlier, and I have to say that I probably couldn’t agree with you more. However, I should point out that the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission has not been cancelled. I know there was some talk to that effect a while back, but this mission is still on the books. You could be justified in considering it delayed or even on hold, I suppose, because it does not have a confirmed launch date (the goal for now is 2015). But “cancelled” is definitely premature.

Larry Sessions
JPL/SSA

I know a fair number of astronauts, and I can’t think of any off-hand who would travel into space “under any risk.” They have families and want to watch their kids grow up just like anyone else.

I’m all for people doing science in space, as I stated in my post. I’m not saying that robots should replace people entirely, only where it makes sense. I do disagree with the notion that astronauts have to be involved for people to care about space exploration. Piloted missions to ISS generate hardly any Internet hits; robots on Mars beat Internet traffic records. People want to see new places.

David

I think you might need to read what I wrote more carefully. I don’t mean to be rude here, obviously. For example, I didn’t say that I thought that teleoperated robots could do HST servicing. That Sean O’Keefe said such a thing reflected his lack of technical know-how. I said that HST servicing by humans is a prototype for human servicing of other valuable robotic spacecraft in the future. It’s one of the things humans bring to the robot-astronaut partnership. Humans would, of course, be given servicing assignments selectively; when benefits outweighed costs.

My “vision for space exploration” presupposes that all the relevant players will sign on. You are absolutely right about the circularity of the argument; I assume that people will decide that exploring space is a thing worth doing. If people decide otherwise, or if space exploration gets lost among all the many priorities people have so that they never get around to making that decision, then what I suggest is moot.

If people do decide that space exploration is worth the level of effort required to involve humans, then ISS suddenly has an important role to play. It won’t be a white elephant. Perhaps people will decide that knowing about the effects of partial gravity on astronauts is important enough to justify a variable-gravity space station. Perhaps work with centrifuges on board ISS will be sufficient, and it won’t be needed. Perhaps people will decide that the benefits of piloted Mars exploration outweigh the risk that a long stay on Mars could harm astronauts and just go for it. It’s impossible to predict right now.

I’m not proposing a master plan; I’m suggesting a philosophy. Basically, it has four parts. First, space exploration is a good basis for NASA’s programs. Second, humans should be used to explore space when they make sense and robots should be used when they make sense. “Make sense” means when the benefits outweigh the costs. Third, we have a lot to learn about how humans operate in space, so humans should focus on that for the time being while robots explore. Fourth, if we find that humans can operate in space and on worlds for long periods (decades), then maybe we should consider “exploration by settlement.” That model has served humans well for hundreds of thousands of years.

As I stated, no one wants to lose a $500-million robot. But most people would rather lose a robot than an astronaut. If you suppose that a given space exploration task has some benefit, then you have to decide what level of risk is acceptable to achieve that benefit. Is it worth the risk of losing a $150-billion piloted mission, or is it worth the risk of losing a $150-million robotic mission, or is it worth something in between?

By the way, I think that the moon has value, but not enough to risk astronauts in any major way. The moon would be an ideal place to explore using teleoperations; it could be the place where teleoperations in space comes into its own. I do not believe that the moon is a good place to get humans ready for Mars exploration; the costs outweigh the benefits, not least because the moon is very different from Mars. I do believe that it would be handy to be able to land humans there occasionally.

Your point about the ethics of placing intelligent machines at risk in space is intriguing. If we designed robots that were “human,” then it would be unethical to treat them as anything but “human.” This is, however, an immense can of worms; thankfully, it’s not one that we have to worry about quite yet.