Even the Soviet space programme, in the decades after losing something like twenty million lives in a war that everyone would rather have avoided, was not reckless with the lives of its astronauts. Because the astronauts and their training are themselves a valuable asset.

There's probably a lot to be written about the precise moral boundary, but Western culture is very against missions which are definitely suicidal while OK with those that merely have a very high chance of getting you killed.

>Because the astronauts and their training are themselves a valuable asset.

Magellan, Hudson, Cook and a litany of others were certainly not cheap cannon fodder. Yet they were allowed to take on immense personal risk and risk to their crews, above and beyond the standards of the time because it was deemed worth it.

There is a fine line between reckless and acceptable risk. The cost of such endeavors absolutely pales in comparison to the long term potential for wealth creation for the rest of humanity by making the resources of other planets reachable.

Vladimir Komarov would argue against your theory

Then why cosmonauts wrote a letter to Politburo suggesting sending them to fly around the Moon in Zond capsule even though it didn't have perfect flights? The reasoning was that the spacecraft deficiencies were correctable should a crew be onboard.

Wasn't there the same situation with Soyuz-1, when they thought the man onboard would help correct flight problems?

I hope that when (if?) SpaceX's Starship becomes fully operational we'll get the sort of bold explorers going on their own missions at their own risk. If some wealthy young guys want to go on a mission to Mars in the same spirit as Shackleton or Darwin or Edmund Hillary I think they should be able to. Those explorers and scientists knew the great risks they were taking but chose to do it anyways because they valued furthering human achievement more than they valued their own safety. When an exploration mission's acceptable risk of death is 10% instead of 0.01% we'll see great things being accomplished.

They went to places that, without human exploration, we couldn't know anything about.

That's just not generally true anymore. We know things about other planets in the solar system, and planets and stars elsewhere in the galaxy, and in other galaxies, without any human ever having to go to those places.

The combination of sophisticated probes and more much sensitive sensing technology has really changed the justification for human exploration, possibly so much that the justification is mostly gone.

It's always amazed me how much we can discover just by measuring the dances of distant stars.

Except that most explorers didn't go because they cared about geology; they explored because they wanted to colonize/conquer. We evolved in Africa and literally colonized (almost) every continent on Earth before we had invented writing, much less science.

The explorers that will go out into the solar system, like Jared Isaacman, will go for glory, fame, and/or profit, none of which can be gained by probes, no matter how sophisticated.

Their trips were paid for by people who expected discoveries of various kinds to yield a net win (land, minerals, food, whatever).

The explorers' dreams are of less importance than their benefactors' expectations.

Good point. But the same applies today--the benefactors like Musk, Isaacman, and Bezos all expect to gain from the exploration, maybe not in terms of money, but at least in fame, or as they put it, "advancing human achievement."

Right. But 60 years ago, putting a human on the moon was universally seen as "advancing human achievement". I would argue that right now, where we are not actually about to build a moon or Mars base, putting people out there is not widely seen as "advancing human achievement".

Sending someone to Mars without them dying (and maybe bringing them back) will be a huge step. There's so much we can do on and around Mars, however, without anyone being out there, and some of them are also likely to be huge advancements.

Similarly for the asteroid belt. Yes, it will probably need humans out there eventually, but there's a massive, massive task of mapping and exploring it that can and almost certainly will be done without launching humans into space.

You're not entirely wrong when extrapolating from historic trends up to-say- 1999. But the price of launching humans into space has gone down dramatically as is this century (to the point where privately funded LEO missions have become viable), and looks to be going down rapidly in the near future. Space flight looks like it might be entering a period akin to Moore's law in IT.

Put a handful of geologists on a Mars base with an ATV, some hammers and chisels and I'm sure they could accomplish the greatest feats of discovery in their field perhaps ever.

Note, I'm not saying that this would be easy or safe or cheap. But I am suggesting that the science achieved by getting some real scientists on Mars would be qualitatively and quantitatively greater than robotic missions.

Given that resources are always going to be limited, absolute improvements matter less than value-per-currency-unit. And the value of putting people there at this stage of the game seems quite likely to be fairly limited.

SpaceX is currently drastically reducing the price per currency unit as is, and their current prototype is intended to smash a few more price barriers; to the point where the number of probes might hit diminishing returns, and actual human scientists become affordable. We'll have to see! At any rate it seems to be becoming commercially viable, even if SpaceX aren't the ones to do it (they do have competition chasing their tails).

AFAICT, science with actual human scientists requires every piece of equipment and then some that would be on a probe.

So the cost with actual human scientists is never going to be below a probe and will realistically be significantly higher.

That means that the actual human scientists need to bring significant value to the endeavour for it to make sense.

This argument is plausible for short range so long as there's no mass produced spacecraft with a payload capacity of 100 tons and with a range to reach Mars (at a launch cost expressed in millions, not billions). I'm cautiously optimistic we'll have that capability in the next decade or so.

At the same time we don't have the ability to reach other solar systems at all, nor projected in the next few decades. So we know relatively little about them in fact. Only as much as can be obtained by remote sensing over light years. (Which is to say: not very much.)

I love this perspective! Exploration has probably never "made sense", has it?

Can we carry the not-useless people instead?

As soon as we get some. Main metrics of usefulness would be survival rate in hard vacuum, cosmic radiation and absolutely minimal or extreme temperatures - divided by volume, weight, price and energy requirements - and further by the useful work it can do per unit of time.

In conclusion, not any time soon. Humans will return to the Moon only when we accept that our presence there is purely symbolic/for the cool factor, and decide to eat the enormous price tag.

Yes, I can't help but think of astronauts as goldfish in bowls. There, but somehow not there.

I guess the parent meant that it was comparatively way cheaper and easier to send probes, rather than people. And that we did send probes, even way further than the Moon.

Whenever a roboticist is asked if robots are better than humans for, say, Moon exploration, he pauses. Red Whittaker from Astrobotic was admitting that robots are not nearly as capable as humans, at the time of Google Lunar X Prize competition. Robots have improved since then, but costs to send humans have also lowered. I'd like to have a conversation on this topic before asserting the answer one way or another.

either we develop a death row space program or yield future civilization in our lifetimes to the country who does.

AI driven androids (or more likely cephalopoids) might be able to bootstrap some initial habitat, but the prisoner/android conflict in spacefaring is going to be very real, imo.

> but god forbid one or two people dying pursuing true exploration as volunteers.

Given what happened to first dog sent to the space - they might not know what they’re signing up for.

It’s a crucial element for control over your population. You need to instill a high worth of their lives, otherwise the danger of rebellion and refusal is too high.