NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say

Re:NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say by jessriedel on Monday November 23, 2015 @12:09PM (#10615661)

"Rational" is not a property of ends, it is a property of means (and beliefs). All ends are arbitrary.

The robots sent to mars are not useful for any reasonable economic reason. Even insofar as you count speculative basic research as economically useful, there are vastly better ways to spend that money on speculative basic research on Earth.

So why go to Mars? Because either (1) you find the basic research being done about Martian geology particularly compelling or (2) you want to see it explored by humans for its own sake. If you really actually believe in (1), then by all means; send more robots. But I'll bet 100:1 that you personally have no appreciation for the basic science questions, which are mostly very technical and boring. (Hint: grand-seeming questions about life are promoted for publicity and funding reasons, but these are not the ones that actually drive the science, and we are not learning more about the origin of life from going to Mars.)

Rather, I think you'll have to admit we want to go to Mars because it is awesome. You may think sending metal under our control is just as awesome as sending flesh and blood humans, but ultimately this is an aesthetic judgement which is not grounded in rationality. Personally, I would like to see humans walk there, and I'm happy to pay my citizen-share of $100/year over the next decade to make it happen.

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Re:NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say by jacquesm on Monday November 23, 2015 @01:02PM (#10616029)

I'd happily invest in SpaceX if they let me. Even if it counts as 'wasted' money in the books of some the simple fact that humanity would aspire to walking on another planet is worth backing. Robot exploration just doesn't feel the same to me. Hearing a 'roger' beep still gives me the willies and I was only 4 when the moonlandings happened. Nothing we did after that was as impressive to me, even though I'm sure it was easier to impress my 4 year old self than it will be to impress me today, walking on Mars would certainly qualify.

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Re:NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say by taurath on Monday November 23, 2015 @01:02PM (#10616027)

I think you should work on quantifying the power of "awesome" in terms of increased planetwide hopefulness and collaboration. Optimism itself is a very powerful and meaningful thing to achieve.

Pretending "aesthetics" don't matter and our hardware isn't very significantly designed to respond to emotion is a huge flaw in "purely logical" reasoning. For goodness sake didn't we already cover this in Star Trek TNG?

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Re:NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say by dmfdmf on Monday November 23, 2015 @01:07PM (#10616058)

>"Rational" is not a property of ends, it is a property of means (and beliefs). All ends are arbitrary.

So let's just skip the trip to Mars and spend the money to build high-tech pyramids in the Nevada desert and sacrifice virgins.

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Re:NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say by anigbrowl on Monday November 23, 2015 @02:24PM (#10616626)

Isn't that the whole point of Las Vegas?

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Re:NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say by the8472 on Monday November 23, 2015 @04:39PM (#10617499)

One justification for space exploration is to eventually colonize space as a means of decentralization.

It's still far off in the future, but we have to take one step at a time. One of those steps will be sending people on a mission there with a return ticket, eventually establish a continuously manned research base etc. etc.

So there still may be some utility in the long run.

Of course there might be other approaches to bootstrap space colonization, such as the idea of mining asteroids in orbit and maybe sending people up there in the process.

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Re:NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say by jessriedel on Monday November 23, 2015 @04:59PM (#10617631)

Unfortunately, the thing holding us back from space colonization is not transport, but the technology to make colonies self-sustaining (or at least net economically profitable, even if tied to Earth by an umbilical cord of re-supply). Space transport is a much simpler problem, and investing in it will not much help space colonization.

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Re:NASA not ready for dangers of deep space, auditors say by aggie on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @06:00PM (#10624206)

Transportation is exactly the technology needed to make colonies economically feasible. And as you say, an 'umbilical cord' will surely be necessary for the first colonies -- this is also a problem of transportation.

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