Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

I think the argument about dreams feeding the pipeline of scientists and technologists of the future is a sound one and speaks to the hearts of scientists and technologists everywhere.

I know a robot is cheaper and safer than a manned spacecraft, but are we really willing to make our robots live our adventures while we sit on our couches watching TV?

Space travel has to be profitable, of course. It also has to be cheap. Now think of the price tag of a single F-22. Or the colossal clusterfuck that the F-35 project became. Couldn't we persuade just a couple nations to dedicate the budget of a single aircraft carrier or nuclear submarine to help fund the dreams of the next generation instead?

View on HN

I don't think it's such a sound argument if you could substitute virtually any flashy project that will entrance children for that. You could easily argue that developing sentient (and sapient) Giant Mecha or bioengineering talking unicorns would raise the interest of young people for getting into 'science'.

I'm sorry to say that, but people are just geeking out when they say that manned space travel is worth the expense and risk for the inspiration it will bring. Having space marines or replicating the Enterprise just for the cool factor when there's so much more to do that could benefit humanity in more tangible ways (like, say, ever more powerful AI, garbage processing, vaccine production and energy production) is folly.

Robots make for great expedition R&D. They can gather a lot of information very cheaply compared to manned spaceflight.

I'm not sure space travel has to be profitable. Certainly Christopher Columbus's voyage was not considered (by most people at the time) to be profitable. Yet economies of scale could definitely be taken into account. It is often said that the computing power of the Apollo missions to the moon were less than that of a TI calculator. It seems we should be able to have unmanned missions to the moon by private sector or even partially public funded. After all were sending DIY cameras into near space.

Of course they don't necessarily have to be profitable. The Chinese continued their expeditions for 30 years without being "profitable". My point is that if you want a sustained program that will grow, being self sustaining would be necessary. Eventually it has to pay for itself. I don't think the Europeans would have continued their expeditions if all the returns they got were 100 years of financial losses.

I agree completely! I am a huge fan of Neil Degrasse Tyson and Lawrence Krause. There are far more wasteful spending that we are doing, and there are long term benefits that the R&D of space exploration will deliver to us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com