<story><title>Why Not Mars</title><url>https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gary_0</author><text>The article gets the numbers right but the human part absolutely wrong. I&amp;#x27;d love it if humans were the kind of creatures that could make big advances by taking them one small boring step at a time with no unachievably ambitious end goal driving them forward, but that&amp;#x27;s absolutely not how it works.&lt;p&gt;The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold. A lot of computer science grunt-work in decades past was done by or funded by people who thought they could build C-3PO.&lt;p&gt;Reasonable people who avoid likely financial ruin, who don&amp;#x27;t dream of building impossible machines or visiting other planets, simply don&amp;#x27;t take the risks needed to make actual technological leaps. Reasonable scientific goals that can&amp;#x27;t make headlines don&amp;#x27;t get billions from Congress.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re not capable of building Mars colonies any time soon, that&amp;#x27;s true, but who knows what we&amp;#x27;ll invent as we blunder our way in that direction nonetheless?</text></item><item><author>skissane</author><text>Part of article’s argument, can be summarised as “US Congress spends over $10 billion a year on grandiose and unachievable Martian vision-imagine what we could achieve if they gave that to JPL for robotic missions instead”. But that isn’t how Congress works. If they cancelled all expenditure on human space flight, they’d be unlikely to redirect any more than a fraction of that to robotic science missions. Instead, it will probably go to a new weapons system, or Medicare, or farm subsidies, or whatever. Spending it on human spaceflight likely even has indirect benefits for the robotic program-some NASA resources are shared by both programs, and taking away the human spaceflight component of their funding may threaten their overall viability, and hence their ability to serve the robotic programs</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cphajduk</author><text>Actually - It doesn&amp;#x27;t get the numbers right either. If you look at the first reference, &amp;quot;[1]&amp;quot;, the author says:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I’ll justify this figure in detail later on. For now, consider that each SLS launch costs $4.2B, and that developing just the Orion space capsule has cost $20B. The ISS, which is functionally close to a Mars transfer vehicle, has so far cost $250 billion.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;With absolutely no regard for the massive cost per kg to orbit improvement being achieved by new space companies (SpaceX, RocketLab, etc.)&lt;p&gt;The author has cherry-picked his facts to fit his opinion.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Not Mars</title><url>https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gary_0</author><text>The article gets the numbers right but the human part absolutely wrong. I&amp;#x27;d love it if humans were the kind of creatures that could make big advances by taking them one small boring step at a time with no unachievably ambitious end goal driving them forward, but that&amp;#x27;s absolutely not how it works.&lt;p&gt;The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold. A lot of computer science grunt-work in decades past was done by or funded by people who thought they could build C-3PO.&lt;p&gt;Reasonable people who avoid likely financial ruin, who don&amp;#x27;t dream of building impossible machines or visiting other planets, simply don&amp;#x27;t take the risks needed to make actual technological leaps. Reasonable scientific goals that can&amp;#x27;t make headlines don&amp;#x27;t get billions from Congress.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re not capable of building Mars colonies any time soon, that&amp;#x27;s true, but who knows what we&amp;#x27;ll invent as we blunder our way in that direction nonetheless?</text></item><item><author>skissane</author><text>Part of article’s argument, can be summarised as “US Congress spends over $10 billion a year on grandiose and unachievable Martian vision-imagine what we could achieve if they gave that to JPL for robotic missions instead”. But that isn’t how Congress works. If they cancelled all expenditure on human space flight, they’d be unlikely to redirect any more than a fraction of that to robotic science missions. Instead, it will probably go to a new weapons system, or Medicare, or farm subsidies, or whatever. Spending it on human spaceflight likely even has indirect benefits for the robotic program-some NASA resources are shared by both programs, and taking away the human spaceflight component of their funding may threaten their overall viability, and hence their ability to serve the robotic programs</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>runarberg</author><text>&amp;gt; The first advances in science were made by people trying to get rich turning worthless metals into gold.&lt;p&gt;And the planetary motions were discovered by somebody trying to prove that the 5 planets all fit inside a babushka doll of the 5 platonic solids. This says nothing of what would happen if these scientists had different creeds or different goals. Most scientific discoveries are indeed very boring. Vera Rubin discovered dark matter while trying study the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, a very simple and very down to earth goal that lead to a remarkable discovery. At the same time Jane Goodall’s big creed was that maybe it is OK to empathize with the individual animals you are studying.&lt;p&gt;Grand goals are neither necessary nor sufficient for making scientific advancements. And while some goals might be useful, others are just as likely to be a major distraction. There is reason to believe that a human mars landing falls in the latter category.</text></comment>