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Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

'"I am more interested in maximizing the odds of success for this bold undertaking and making it as safe as any human journey into the deep space can be, than I am in having NASA meet arbitrary deadlines," Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson — a Democrat from Texas and the chairwoman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology — said at a recent hearing.'

Waiting to make a journey until it is "as safe as can be" means that one never makes the journey at all. This has been NASA's curse since the Challenger explosion. Human space exploration is not going to happen with a "safety first" culture.

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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 devastating. Trying to conquer space a handful of people at a time is the slow and dangerous way of accomplishing this task. We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly. In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe.“

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 advanced enough to build that infrastructure for us in space environments.

We accelerate the development of our machines and iterate faster with the extra money saved by not sending humans.

At some point in the future, our machines will do most of what we can. The advanced robotics, etc will pay an extra dividend on earth too.

Are you trying to tell me that in the era of Boston Dynamics' Spot Mini and Waymo/Tesla Autopilot we couldn't come up with robots capable of building space infrastructure for us?

Those are really good examples of exactly why we can't. All of those just have really good marketing behind them.

Spotmini at this point is kind of just a neat toy. It doesn't really do anything. It is definitely not autonomous and requires human intervention.

Self driving cars are a bit of a pipe dream unless there is a massive breakthrough in actual A.I. they don't work outside of ideal conditions. Driving in rain, snow, sunrise, sunset are all out of reach for the most part. As they lack human intuition and they can't react on the fly. For example there is no way it would be able to navigate a parking lot that needs to be repainted. But humans do all the time.

What can a human in a spacesuit accomplish on the moon that a machine can't? It's a genuine question, though I'll admit my initial answer is not much.

The human-driven rover on Apollo 17 drove 35.9 KM in the three days Apollo 17 spent on the moon. Lunkhod 2 went 39 KM, but it took from January to June 1973 to do so.

When the distance from Earth increases, machines become slower. Opportunity drove 45 KM, but it took 14 years.

nothing Tesla autopilot can't handle... (less pedestrians on the moon than even a city in arizona!)

Some more craters and layers of light moondust to sink in, though.

Climb down a cliff using rope system.

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?

Building a permanent settlement for 2-10 people is a really good exercise if you eventually want a permanent settlement for 100 people.

Someone dying is devastating if you have a connection to that person. People die every second and if everyone was devastated by every death then the world would grind to a halt. The first people going into deep space dying would be devastating to billions because billions of people will feel a personal connection to the person dying. This is a grave thing causing so much pain, but hopefully space travel can become a boring activity like landing a rocket has after 80 successful ones.

If people aren't going to space it not being conquered. Explored, but not lived in. About 270 men left on the Magellan expedition and 18 returned. Some people are willing to take that kind of risk for the right kind of project/adventure. I give my best wishes to those who wish to try.

Yes, that was covered six years ago too. The Alaskan fishery example is a modern comparison.

We retired the Space Shuttle because it was too dangerous. One accident every hundred flights.

We live in a different world than we did hundreds of years ago. One accident will require a review board and many expensive changes. Flights will be grounded.

The point that I really want you to get is this:

“In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now”

NASA/US Govt retired the space shuttle since it was extremely expensive to operate and there was funding competition for next generation vehicles/missions.

Safety might have had a impact, but it was not the reason the shuttle was retired.

Yes, the Shuttle was expensive and Project Constellation was going to replace it. We’d only be without orbital capabilities for a few years.

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/163092main_constellation_program_ov...

Unfortunately, that was canceled 10 years ago. That was superseded by Orion?

More or less. Constellation was effectively broken up into smaller chunks (Artemis, Orion, Commercial Crew) versus being a unified program.

Why have one manned space program when you can have three for 3x cost.

Because they have completely different mission parameters.

Commercial crew is for ISS trips, so short duration trips, so limited life support or things like toilets required.

Artemis needs to send a lander to the moon and come back. So 3-7 days with extended life support, and the ability to land on the moon with a vehicle and take off within the size confines of a single launch.

Orion is for deep space exploration, no lander necessary, and extended life support.

So yes, three completely different vehicles. The last time we tried to combine multiple roles into a unified chassis, the F35 happened.

Could be true, but if we wait too long I think people would just stop trying to do it. Rocket technology basically was stuck with 1960's technology and ideas until Elon Musk decided he wanted to build a human colony on Mars. Now we have rockets that are re-usable and soon a likely $100/kg to orbit lift capability.

After crew dragon, SpaceX is decoupling from NASA and won't be beholden the their review their board. The NASA astronauts can continue to head up to the ISS on crew dragon while others can head off into the solar system in the Starship without them.

I wouldnt worry about those who dont understand why we must immediately become spacefaring. They're obviously on the "wrong side" of history as environmental pressure will make unarguable.

I'm more in the "humans are much less competent than you seem to think" camp. No amount of needing to get off the planet is going to make us able to live on Mars (or a similarly unfriendly planet). It's entirely possible that you will find yourself on the wrong side of history, where any publicly funded endeavor that didn't go directly or indirectly towards saving our current planet will be retroactively seen as futile and a gigantic waste of resources and brain power.

This is obviously false. Any technology that could allow humans to live anywhere but on earth (the moon, Mars, space stations, generation ship, you name it) would be infinitely more applicable on an environmentally devastated earth up to any degree of devastation.

Living on Mars would be much harder than living on the earth after an all-out nuclear war with the worse effects of global warming present, in the aftermath of a small asteroid strike.

In fact, diverting much needed resources from saving what can be saved of the climate for the pie-in-the-sky (literally) goal of having a minuscule handful of human beings possibly live a scant few years off the Earth in 20 years time is lunacy.

We have more resources than we know what to do with. Negative to zero interest rates all over the place. The problems on Earth are not being solved or worked on due to political problems not resource limitations. Plus total current space related expenditures are probably 0.05% of global GDP. Global GDP is ~$85 trillion would mean a space spend of $42.5 billion. Sounds about right.

It's not just about monetary resources. There are also engineering, research, PR and other kinds of resources spent on this.

Not to mention, there are people who seem to honestly believe that moving to Mars is a viable strategy for humanity in the same te scale as global warming (perhaps even Elon Musk among them? Hopefully not, but definitely GP among them). That is such a silly idea, but with such potential to be used in the concentrated campaign of convincing people to ignore global warming, that it must be spoken against any time it comes up.

> "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.forconstructionpros.com/blogs/construction-toolb...).

It's only when we get to space travel that we suddenly become shy about the human cost of progress. It's big and dramatic and failures are very public. Arguably we should be willing to take much greater risks at this point to establish ourselves as interplanetary.

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 point in human space exploration: almost anything a human being can do, a robotic probe can do far cheaper. So the point is literally to have a human being there, and having the human die there is not just a risk, it negates the entire premise of the project.

No one will plan an Olympic opening ceremony with a non-negligible chance of someone dying on stage. Why? Because the entire purpose of the Olympic is to show off your country, and if someone dies while half of the world is watching, you have failed your project. Same thing.

>almost anything a human being can do, a robotic probe can do far cheaper

... 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 ;)

You are right but it's comparing apples to oranges. If you compared missions of comparable weight you would find that capability of robotic missions increased many times over current missions, reason is that any human mission would be much more massive than current unmanned missions. This is especially true for long range manned missions where crew needs food, water, shielding and space to survive long term in space, for a robotic mission distance is just time.

What robots cannot do well is be flexible in their mission. This is something that humans excel.

Fair point. I guess the best solution would be to just further develop both: Manned and unmanned missions.

Also I think the psychological effects of having actual humans doing this stuff on the people staying back home should not be underestimated. Would we have an Elon Musk today[0] hadn't we landed Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969?

[0]Or at least SpaceX, this guy's endeavours are all over the place :D

I'm not sure what the net tonnage of robot missions we've sent to mars to date is but that level of knowledge we've acquired is on the same order as what we'd get from a couple humans spending a week there with a bunch of tools and scientific instruments. Humans ability to improvise lets us quickly identify what is of interest and study it saving us from having to send multiple iterations of robots.

For any given fixed distance (e.g. mars) at some point there's a crossover where sending some people up there to go kick rocks is actually cheaper than sending a series of robots that kick rocks in progressively more detail. I'm not sure if we've reached that technology point yet but as space flight gets cheaper and cheaper it will eventually happen for the moon and then for mars.

Well, if we're building an airport, why not just have robots build it? By your same logic, it would be so much cheaper! No healthcare or wages or food or unions to deal with! Plus, no chance of accidental death that would make the public feel sad about that airport!

You see the fallacy in this argument yes? You're only looking at pure operating cost. Saying robots are cheaper ignores so many other factors like the insane amount of capital it would take to develop robots that could be anywhere close to as productive as a human. In addition, everything past Earth orbit is far enough away that Earth cannot make real-time decisions for you. Robots cannot make split second decisions to save themselves. Being able to think is extremely valuable is extreme environments.

Plus, this argument just plain ignores the entire point of space travel. We must permanently populate other planets or we will become extinct. Full Stop.

A bunch of robots colonizing the Galaxy cannot carry with them the light of consciousness.

Of course, the "fallacy" is that humans are actually cheaper than robots for a lot of things, when you don't have to drag a metric fuckton of gas exchangers, thermostats, pressurized suits, landers, antennae, and what not.

I thought that part was well understood.

safety first doesn't mean no risks can be taken, but rather that concerns like publicity or money don't become a primary concern for NASA the way it <sort> of was with the challenger disaster

I would reckon it ain't gonna happen by 2024, given the mission critical failures Boeing has had with the Starliner.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/science/boeing-starliner-...

Or the SLS system:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/after-a-corrective-a...

The Starliner is for low-Earth orbit and is not part of the Artemis architecture for going to the Moon.

"As safe as can be" doesn't mean "It's guaranteed nothing will go wrong".

Best efforts vs. guaranteed delivery service.

"Safe as can be" is completely subjective, maybe in 1000 years it will be 100% safe due new technological advances and improvements in simulations, so "as safe as can be" is likely to be way after we are no longer alive.

"Safe as can be" is objective, it means that considering what we know, our tech and what may go wrong we can say "we are not going to be able to make it safer before a long time, we have eliminated random threats we can foresee but we can't prevent what we don't know that could happen from ever happening". That's what `as safe as can be` mean. `As safe as can be` doesn't mean 100% safe.

You are conflating the unknown with subjective.

Spacecraft are on the edge of known technology. New components, materials, designs, computer simulations, etc., are being created all the time. What we know is constantly changing so "safer before a long time" does not really apply.

I'm not so sure that the phrase necessarily means exactly what you are saying it does.

Specifically, does it mean "as safe as can be given our actual budgetary constraints" or "as safe as can be given a 1000x increase in funding that would make it marginally safer but certainly not be worth the additional investment" ?

The Space Shuttle isn't exactly the safest nor the most efficient design to ferry astronauts into space.

It all starts when we leave the womb, which is a stupid reckless decision.

Haha. I have a personal saying that is similar.

"Life causes death."

So, the key is clearly to never live in the first place. :-)

It all began when the Universe was created, which has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.

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