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Comment by unchocked | Hacker News Reader

Clear skies and tailwinds. Can't get back to the Moon fast enough, while we still have living continuity to Apollo. Can't believe how low the low in our space program has been.

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Pictures of Pluto, a helicopter on Mars, I’m more inspired than ever by nasa

And I love them for it. But I want humans on the Moon again.

To be fair, the pure scientific impact of the robotic missions is probably much higher than human ones (besides advances in medical/bioscience). But, placing people on the moon probably brings more funding for NASA than robots.

Edit: Both are still extremely cool though

To compare the scientific return of robots and people, we can compare the results of the only space rock both have visited: the Moon. The six manned Apollo missions brought back much much much more scientific return than all of the contemporary robotic missions. Apollo brought back 382 kg of moon rocks. Three Soviet probes (first one, Luna 16, between Apollo 12 and 14) brought back a total of 326g. While it's a bit facile to claim that's the whole difference, I would say that the difference in scientific return was at least one order of magnitude, if not quite as large as the moon rock numbers.

Now, the Apollo program also cost much more than the robotic missions. If you are willing to invest enough (e.g. Apollo was >1% of US GDP/year for most of the 60's) you can get an enormous amount of scientific return from a manned mission, but robots are useful for budgets that can't cover a manned mission.

Bear in mind that the Luna missions were done with 1960s Soviet robotics technology... And were only a side-show to their goal of a manned landing, which was hamstrung by repeated launcher problems. (And as soon as they lost the moon race, interest in this immediately dried up on the Soviet side - the sample return in the 70s was an afterthought.)

If your goal is to plant a flag and ship back ~400 Kg of moon rocks, you could do it today, using robots, for a tiny fraction of a manned mission's budget. The thing is, bringing back 400 Kg of moon rocks is not 400 times more valuable than bringing back 1 Kg of moon rocks.

Right, but the lunar science was not just limited to sample return, and here the J missions (Apollo 15-17) with their SIM bay cameras produced much better image quality than even Lunar Orbiter for much of the Moon's surface (Lunar Orbiter 5, in the polar orbit, was able to map parts of the Moon that the J missions never saw.) Similarly, the rover's traveled farther than the Lunkhod's did, showing us a much greater area of the surface. And the most sophisticated scientific instrument ever to go to the moon, even today, would be Harrison Schmitt, with his Harvard Geology Ph.D brain and hands.

As for "done with 1960's technology" so was Apollo: the ability to discover hydrogen (used to find the ice in the lunar crater shadows) wasn't possible with 1960's sensors that were light enough even for the much larger mass and power budgets of an Apollo spacecraft (vis a vis Lunar Orbiter or similar probe).

Robotics has advanced a lot further from the 60s than the ability of people wearing space suits to manipulate instruments.

In fact, the latter hasn't really advanced at all in those 60 years.

By the nature of the beast, a spacecraft with humans is going to have absolutely thunderous mass and energy budgets compared to robotic ones, so any instrument you can put on a robot you can put on a manned mission.

In a similar manner, I would expect any manned mission to Mars to employ a lot of robots: control is much easier when the human making the decisions is a few light seconds away versus 8 light minutes. And if you have the mass (and money) for a manned mission, you can tuck in a bunch of robots for very little extra. So a human mission will always be strictly greater than (in scientific return and cash budget) robot mission.

> By the nature of the beast, a spacecraft with humans is going to have absolutely thunderous mass and energy budgets compared to robotic ones, so any instrument you can put on a robot you can put on a manned mission.

By the nature of the beast, for the cost of a single manned mission, you can launch dozens of expendable, unmanned missions, that can go on for more than a few days. Robots don't need to eat, or breathe, and they don't grouse when you abandon them on an alien surface.

Coincidentally last night I re-watched one of my favorite episodes of "From the Earth to the Moon," "Galileo was Right," which focuses on the Apollo 15 crews getting field training in geology. Their instructor (along with backup LM pilot Jack Schmitt, a geologist, who then flew on Apollo 17) emphasized identifying and collecting the "right" rocks, not just "any" rocks, which led to some of the more interesting samples, including the "Genesis Rock."

Imagine how many robots you could launch for the same money

Always struck me as a vanity project when there were much more deserving uses for the money.

James Webb is still planned to launch this year too (fingers crossed)

Last years Chang'e 5 mission was essentially a robotic Apollo mission. This decade does look to be promising for Lunar exploration.

Chang'e 5 was more like a modern day Luna 16 than an Apollo mission.

Luna 16 had no rendezvous in lunar orbit, while Change'e 5 had the sample return capsule rendezvous with the Orbiter, like the Appolo missions.

The reason the space program wound down was because the moon race was a vanity project. Once the vanity goal was achieved, nobody had any reason to go back there.

Meanwhile, people and groups with non-vanity goals are making extensive use of space in 2021, compared to 1969... But that's not very sexy, because things like weather satellites and imaging satellites, and communications satellites and the occasional telescope actually accomplish concrete, useful things, at a fraction of the Apollo budget.

> nobody had any reason to go back there

Don't tell that to the Radio Astronomers. Something, something, dark side.[0]

[0]https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_...

SpaceX is still blowing up rockets like it's 1950s NASA, maybe we should just fully fund the competent folks at 2020s NASA instead.

NASA seems confident enough in SpaceX's ability to award them a contract for Starship to take them back to the moon.

"This is but one of many genuinely shocking aspects of NASA's decision a week ago to award SpaceX—and only SpaceX—a contract to develop, test, and fly two missions to the lunar surface. The second flight, which will carry astronauts to the Moon, could launch as early as 2024."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/five-reasons-why-nas...

SpaceX also blew up a huge amount of their Falcon rockets at the beginning too, and now they're consistently bringing astronauts to the ISS and payloads into orbit. So I'm not sure what your point is.

I love how whenever SpaceX fails to land a booster that I see headlines of "SpaceX blows up another rocket", even if it still delivered its payload to orbit.

I do wonder, however, where NASA would be if they would have continued with the DC-X prototype instead of abandoning it when it had a landing leg failure causing it to topple over in an early test.

It's because of Elon's hubris and the ways that hubris is baked into the entire institutional culture. I think far fewer people would delight in their failures if they showed an ounce of humility from any of their mistakes. Instead, they continue to make wild eyed proclamations and promises of impossible goals, but it's Elon so people continue to believe him for some reason.

Great progress comes from Elon's hubris.

> people continue to believe him for some reason.

I believe in him, and the reason is obvious. He gets things done nobody else seems able to.

NASA/JPL have an ample history of blowing up experimental rockets. Same as the Russians. The Germans had it hard with the V2s as well

I'd recommend people to look up into those previous failures (and SpaceX is finding "new ways" to fail)

lol. I rarely test my code, but when I do, I test it on prod.

Unit tests can't catch all bugs ;)

See the book "V2" by Dornberger on all the failures of the V2 rockets. Quite a good read.

Occurrence of failures directly correlates to occurrence of growth and innovation. SpaceX is (a) innovating very fast, and therefore we see lots of failures, (b) embracing those failures as opportunities to grow, and (c) installing many sensors and collecting a lot of data to maximize the chance that they can learn a lot from whatever failures occur.

Make no mistake, if a company or institution isn't trying a lot and failing a lot to achieve a new type of goal, it's also not making much progress toward any new type of goal.

Then why shouldn't we apply this same standard to government projects? Any time a government project doesn't go perfectly it's used an excuse to scrap the very concept of government since "they can't do anything right".

As far as I'm concerned, the government is free to innovate, as long as my daily life (and that of my fellow Americans) is not part of what's being experimented with. We have the entire corpus of world history to refer to for experimental data on government policy -- let's use it as much as possible. Social crises aren't worth creating for the data they yield.

Regarding technical innovation, NASA did a lot of that in the 1960s. There were a lot of failures then (Mercury and Gemini programs), followed by incredible success (Apollo program). NASA's work with SpaceX is another great form of innovation -- pick the most innovative commercial partners and move forward.

The US culture around government is really weird. And yes, if people gave the government permission to fail sometimes they could probably do things 10x cheaper. But that requires a level of trust that just isn't there. I don't know why, and I'm glad I live somewhere more functional.

No only does lack of trust prevent innovation, on the other end of the spectrum you have people who won't tolerate failure because it might give the distrustful of government people data point or talking point.

I'm more critical of SpaceX but I have to admit that they've managed to blow up a lot of hardware without killing any passengers. That suggests they know what they're doing.

I'd rather have them fail their first 9 attempts that each take a month before succeeding, than succeeding on the first attempt that takes a decade.

Failure during research & development isn't necessarily a bad thing.

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