"Why send humans into space?"
Someone already did answer this question. In case you missed it the first time:
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." JFK- 1962.
"
3
I believe that humanity was born when the first of us looked at a hill and wondered what was on the other side.
8
The story's lede asks, "Why send humans into space?" If you actually ask the question, you probably cannot comprehend the answer.
3
How absurd...
We waste more than $700 billion a year on blowing up villages in the Hindu Khush, for what reason, I know not.
But we can’t find $5 or $6 billion a year to get us to the moon. Where we could actually learn something.
What a ridiculous and small country we have become.
17
A wonderfully written piece - many thanks.
It got my attention when he talked about science starting in fits and starts - with Vikings and Columbus.
So, how can we forget Magellan who actually died attempting to circumnavigate earth by discovering his strait.
Next year will be 500 years since magellan found that magical strait where I was last year.
And even today, circumnavigating earth in a ship is still an arduous task for most - just think that Volvo race. Try Drake passage around Antarctica which I have also done.
For that matter - without Panama Canal - the West Coast would not be what it is if we had to just rely on Magellan.
My recent visit told me how remote that place still is and how we are still discovering what Magellan only glimpsed.
And if it were not for Antonio Pigafetta - we would not have even known about his feats.
To me, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and let's not forget Michael Collins will be remembered as Magellans - 500 years from now.
And folks would marvel at their endurance, strength and serendipity in landing on a heavenly planet - which will be a routine excursion then.
7
No, I don't think space is "what's next." What's next is trauma from environmental losses. We still have not outgrown the notion, admitted or not, that the earth exists for man's disposal. And, it is indeed getting disposed of. Not much more than some space trash we've generated over 65 years will remain to testify to anyone of our existence. It is so creepy to realize we are an experiment of life that, once we overcame our profound ignorance, we used our accomplishments and knowledge to just use up and spoil everything. Well, maybe in some future iteration somewhere, life will be more successful. "It was great fun, but it was just one of those things."
16
Don't send humans anywhere until self-sustaining habitation is in place.
11
No question, the Apollo moon landings were magnificent accomplishments. But they led nowhere, in good part because they were constrained by a 10-year deadline.
The "in this decade" constraint led NASA to abandon Von Braun's "earth-orbit rendezvous" approach, which would have first constructed some earth-orbiting space-exploration infrastructure, like a space station for assembling, fueling and dispatching deep space missions. Instead, NASA pursued a simpler & faster approach, which could be completed by the deadline but left nothing in place for future manned exploration, so we've spent 50 years in low-earth orbit.
This time around NASA proposed a more visionary approach, including construction of lunar-orbiting infrastructure that would support moon missions but also Mars exploration and a longer term presence on the moon.
Now Trump and Pence have imposed a new 2024 deadline on NASA, so this time along we stand to repeat the short-sighted approach taken with Apollo. NASA now plans to repeat the Apollo program with better technology, but it also may lead nowhere.
11
In the early 2000s, we were spending over 3 billion a year, worldwide, on ringtones. Humanity expends enormous effort on both the trivial, and on the basic needs we all share. Of course we need to do the necessary things, however you define them. But we can, and must, also strive to create and explore. Not just for the indirect benefits that will accrue and assist us as we tend to the necessary, but because it's how we lift ourselves towards the future.
But if some of us do feel the need for thrift, let's give up our ringtones before we sacrifice the human need to explore.
9
Because it's what's next. That simple answer has been good enough for all of human history, and that should always be the case.
4
@Subo I'd suggest stopping to save our planet should come first.
8
I've read science fiction for more than 60 years. I was interested in rockets and space travel since before Sputnik. I knew Arthur C. Clarke, and Heinlein, and Asimov, and many more. All dreamers, and some doers. I've met Buzz Aldrin, too.
Never forget that the technologies that we invented in order to get to the Moon—and, yes, to build ICBMs—are the technologies that we use every second in today's world. To turn our backs on them would be to negate so much of our history and present knowledge.
We can do space exploration, solve our energy problems, do all those things simultaneously. We don't have to throw away our dreams in order to solve our present problems.
If we had done that in centuries past, we'd still be confined to Europe, content with living in in the mud, ruled over by despots.
7
The moon lights up our night sky and inspires many songs of love. But it's worthless. Our visits from 1969 to 1972 revealed that the moon was made of ... rocks and dust. It had no signs of life, no valuable minerals, no potential for militarization. Getting to the moon was a great technological exercise. Exactly twelve people have stepped on the moon, and none since Gene Cernan in 1972. There are good reasons why we stopped in 1972.
Sure, getting a person to Mars would be another fantastic technological exercise. And we will learn that Mars is also made of rocks and dust, perhaps a slightly different color
10
@Gary
The moon has lots of tritium which will someday be used for fusion reactors. It also has water and as for minerals, you engage in astronomical sampling error if you assume there are no worthy elements. Impact craters are very likely places were nickel and iron can be found.
5
We are a curious species. That's why we go to the top of Everest and the bottom of the Marianas Trench. It's why we stop to look at construction sites and car crashes. Eventually, we will go back to the moon and on to Mars even though there are more pressing issues here on Earth. It's our nature.
5
@David DiRoma Idle curiosity is cheap but yields no understanding of the world or of the human condition.
Diligent curiosity takes work, time, and investment, and can yield a lot (cf. Darwin, Humboldt). One of the best lessons is understanding when there's no value in repeating an earlier voyage or experiment to answer old questions, especially when other methods are cheaper, quicker, and provide answers to current ones.
The best lesson of manned space programs is that they're really about ego and politics with nothing to say about "more pressing issues here on Earth."
4
Based on the destruction our so-called intelligent species have wreaked here on Earth, I would have to say that we should put our energies and money into saving what is left of our polluted and desecrated home planet.
13
People don't live in Antarctica. Yet Antarctica is closer than Mars, and has air, water and a nicer climate.
Why do people think we should move to another planet? It took us billions of years to adapt to this one. Do humans really think interplanetary living will be a picnic?
9
One of the reasons we should be against manned space exploration this time is economic. Theses are not the 1960"s, where the USA reigned supreme economically and politically in the world. The deficit is almost 1 trillion, almost 5% of GDP, which is added to the Debt every year! The Debt is 22 trillion, 100% of GDP! Our infrastructure is crumbling and will cost 2 trillion! A new tunnel between N Jersey and NYC, would cost 14 Billion, and is not done because of the cost. In the last 40 years nothing important nationally has been built! We need High Speed Rail because can not rely solely on cars and aviation, and is more efficient and ecological. That would ore exiting than sending humans to space, wchich is against nature.
6
If technological advances helped man to love more, I'd be all for them but they don't! They simply add to man's arsenal to support the human condition, ignorance and ego gratification.
5
Because at some point we are going to have to find a new place to live. At some point we will have trashed this planet so thoroughly as to become uninhabitable or our luck with avoiding really big asteroids will run out.
6
So we spent billions on the space program, how much money did we spend on the Vietnam war, the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, and every “unnecessary” war in between. Can we count those as waste first and commit to reducing those before cutting NASA’s budget.
7
@VS Spent $25 billion on the moon program. Probably comes to about $150 billion today. But that program was instrumental in the rise of semiconductors/integrated circuits, as well as in communications. So, $100 billion dollars industries could be directly tied back to the space program from those sectors alone. Then there were improvements in manufacturing processes, and other industries, like say with cryogenics. The list goes on. The value of those investments likely were gifts that kept on giving into the early 1990s.
4
Ultimately, if we want to extend some form of humanity forever we need continuous development of space travel. Ultimately, the sun will expand into a red giant and engulf the earth... mars will be cooked as well. We have, roughly, 1 billion years. Lots of time. But how long will it take to build space elevators and millennial space ships... if even possible. The time to get to work is now.
3
The question posed by the author is, in my view, stupid. We went to space for political and military reasons; now they are economic ones as well.
But the military reasons predominate; space is the ultimate high ground; own it and you win.
But still, it is a waste to send humans when robots will do just fine. I mean you do know that Star Trek is a fantasy? Right? Right?
3
@D priest. Today’s reality was at one time fantasy. It’s dreamers who drive progress.
5
I was an avid young fan of NASA and the Apollo program as a young boy. My father was one of the army of people at various contractors that built the rocket that got the Saturn V to the Moon and back, so that made it even more special.
I am all for the exploration of space, but only well-considered missions with a clearly defined purpose that is agreed to be of value. The last thing we need is a stunt.
4
We should continue human based space exploration because it invigorates our species. Yes, it will be hard and expensive, and it will be uplifting and inspiring and expand our outlook of what's possible here on planet earth.
In the northern hemisphere, we're having summer. People are out and about, enjoying the weather, beaches, terrain and generally recreating. These activities will not solve world problems like war, global warming and poverty. But they do provide opportunity to relax, regenerate and reflect on what is important.
Continuing space exploration will stretch our imaginations and encourage us to strive to be better.
2
The advancement of science and technology via a space exploration program is not just a good idea--its in our nature. We haven't been able to resist, since the earliest telescopes, the urge to know. Now, our natural urge to learn how to preserve our own planet must be stronger.
Grand plans to inhabit, mine and cultivate moons and planets far away have a very frightening aspect. Have we given up on finding ways to live together here on Earth far, far into the future? Or is the very distant future something we only imagine in the context of Earth's depletion, overpopulation, destruction?
Will we justify fatal abuses here on Earth, on the basis of what may be bio-engineering and social engineering fantasies? Because our efforts along those lines have not been hugely successful here at home. The final frontier is inside us all here on our planet.
1
My understanding is that almost anything manned can be done better robotically in space for a fraction of the size and cost, without danger. Life support systems are large, delicate and heavy.
3
Why space? We have a growing awareness, fueled by the discoveries of megalithic structures sprinkled all over this planet; structures that betray a commonality in architecture that shows that we have ascended the heights of a globe-trotting civilization before. Ours is not the first.
We have the recent discoveries of major impacts in not only the Canadian ice shield some 12 thousand years ago but also craters larger than the island of Manhattan that are being revealed in western Greenland as the glaciers recede (thank you global warming).
It is becoming increasingly clear that as we are now, in some similar variation, we have been before. We reached heights capable of working in stone with an ease we cannot match today. And at those heights something smacked us back to the stone age.
So why space? We need to do it in order to insure the longer term survival of the species. Because as sure as god makes little green apples this planet is going to be hit again someday. And next time we may not be so lucky. So Elon Musk is right, we need to move outward and onward.
And consider; won't it be glorious to reach a point, someday, where we look back upon this planet and see it revealed for what it truly was (and still is) for us; Paradise? We are growing up folks. We are destined to leave this home as all children do. It's a worthwhile endeavor; so let's do it and let the future decide what we become.
John~
American Net'Zen
5
Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon and do these other things not because they are easy, but because they inspire new technologies, new generations, and new understandings of what it means to be human.
I'd much rather our government invest in research and design that pushes us forward, rather than machines of war that hold us back. Only the small minded can't see this.
5
@Stephen
Would that those difficult things have to do with developing reliable, secure next-level communication, or real alternatives to our suicidal destruction of the atmosphere and oceans. Not because they're easy -- but because they are hard.
1
But the development of space technologies led to remote sensing and communication satellites that enabled unprecedented collection of data about the climate, scarce resources, and government / private sector activity.
1
I was a very young man when Armstrong "walked on the Moon". And, I still must ask myself; 'why" ??
Why ?? When - after this Earth, that we humans have SO messed up ~ why do we have the big-ego right to yet mess up another Planet ??
And, why do we get to think: "The Earth is my Dumpster, so I shall not Want" ? Let's just dump it "up there", now, in Space.
Let us make America's roads safe, smooth, and road-worthy again, and do that First !! Let's make our bridges, and Railways safe, too. Let us retain our National Parks, and ecological beauty that is here, for all of Us, and devoid of Fracking, or digging Coal for some Corporate profit, and not for American Citizens. I used to think that America was not for sale. Now, after the EPA's Scott Pruitt, I'm no longer sure.
Yes, to explore the Universe, and outer Space, IS Inviting. But, let not the Galaxy be yet another Planet Earth dumpster for our endless waste and garbage.
Let us Human clean up Mother Earth, first.
Think about it . Pick up your own trash. Make the World a better, healthier, and more beautiful place.
Let us explore outer Space once we have:
(A:) cleaned up our mess here. and
(B:) paid for, and completely cleaned up our mess here.
(C:) repeat - if you haven't accomplished that.
Until then, Space Travel is just kicking the Ecological/Sustainable can down the road. Which amounts to just more rubbish. Bail this beautiful Earth out, first.
Go figure.
8
We have no competition of note to get there. We beat the Russians. Perhaps if the Chinese were interested we may feel a need to compete. Otherwise, why spend the money to send people when we can use orbiters and landing craft for the dirty work.
3
@NOTATE REDMOND
Let go of old-style behavior. We need to let go of the words, "competition, beat, #1, war, power, political dominance, et al. The only race now should be saving this planet we live on right now, in the here and now.
2
There is NO purpose in humans returning to the Moon or anywhere else in space for that matter. The cost of sending humans into space makes it about 10x to 20x more expensive than robotic exploration. It soaks up all the money for real science and just makes us dumber...! The lack of any rational reason to actually go to space with any rational purpose will hopefully sink in to the politicians who seem all too gullible in spending and wasting money on poorly thought out manned missions with no purpose.
4
What would be learned by a seventh moon landing, 50 years or more after the first? Nothing of any scientific value; that can all be done better and cheaper with robots. Little if any technological innovation that isn't already driven by NEO satellites and, again, robots.
Everyone from Trump to Musk to Branson to Bezos to Modi to Abe to Xi to Kim is playing with spaceships, racing to show the world who's got the biggest, studliest ... rocket.
Pretty soon the parade to the moon will resemble the traffic jam trying to summit Mt. Everest, with just about as little significance.
5
Arguments for continuation of space flights, space exploration, humans in space are diverse.
The cons:
1) too expensive
2) rockets have already become recreational vehicles for the rich, moon/Mars bases promise to be elaborate spas
3) physical costs to long-distance space travelers is known to be substantial, perhaps, great, perhaps grave
4) robots can do anything we want done better
5) colonizing and terraforming moons and other planets are homo-sap-centered acts and fundamentally unethical
6) heavenly bodies are dead worlds; nothing much there is out there; long-distance space travel would be deathly boring
7) a big enough chunk of asteroid could wipe out a vehicle, a platform, a base, a colony
The pros
1) practical and theoretical knowledge are intrinsic to our genetic and existential natures
2) we need a getaway destination, Earth Too, in case Earth I gets too hot, too nuked, too bio-contaminated
3) we are more adaptable, more pragmatic, more intuitive, more inventive than robots (sorry, Hal). We have coped, we can cope.
4) problems listed in the "cons" above are not insoluble. Anti-grav propulsion? Gravity operated cable cars to get vehicles, supplies, people into orbit and back down easily and cheaply?
Anyhow, if elected president, I will avidly back carbon and stock transfer taxes to fund space exploration r&d. Win-win.
2
"going to the moon" can be summed up in two words:
male hubris...
Can we get over that already?
2
I just read the article Looking Back at People Watching the Apollo 11 Mission and I was slammed by a realisation:
People cared.
2
Mr. Trump is not Captain Kirk, and our writhing swamp of defense/aerospace contractors are not the Federation.
Mars? An amalgam of distraction and scam.
3
The one and only biological DNA genetic evolutionary fit human race species began in Africa 300, 000 years ago.
There are 7.4 billion humans craving fat, salt, sugar, water, kin and sex by any means necessary including conflict and cooperation. On a planet with a changing ecology we are destined to need to leave home aka Earth for more place and space to live and thrive.
Powered human flight on Earth is a little over a century old. While human spaceflight is nearing 60 years.
Space lacks the gravity, the atmosphere and the radiation protection that is essential to human life. And chemical rockets lack the ability to launch significant payloads at enough speed to make human space travel regular and routine.
Human spaceflight should be an international private and public affair in order to be successful. Beginning with agreeing on a destination and the mission.
4
Imagine the possibiltes if the U.S. and Russia had cooperated as allies after WW II. At the least we would be on Mars by now.
4
The only future for humans is in deep space. It will be as big a leap as when fish crawled up on land and learned to breathe air.
3
It is not accurate to say that Amundsen and Scott were the first two men to reach the South Pole. Amundsen led a team of five men who got there on 14 December 1911. Scott also led a team of five, who got to the Pole on 17 January 1912, and perished on the return trip. So TEN men reached the South Pole in the winter of 1911-12. George J. Dufek was at best the eleventh person to set foot there, not the third as the article says. Dufek arrived at the South Pole via airplane on Halowe'en Day 1956 as part of a party of six. If he stepped off the plane last, Dufek would have been the sixteenth person to set foot at the South Pole.
1
Why do art? Why do music? Why do literature? Why rebuild Notre Dame? Why climb a mountain or whitewater kayak? These things lift our eyes and hearts from the mud we stand in toward the inspiration offered by loftier goals. Engineers and mathematicians and machinists and pilots dream, too, and they offer to share their dreams with all of us.
3
The cost of the Apollo program is always mentioned quasi-apologetically in such articles as this one by Mr Overbye. Yet this is dwarfed by the cost of war in Iraq - at least one trillion dollars so far.
[NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.14 Mar 2013]
2
The story's lede asks, "Why send humans into space?"
If you actually ask the question, you probably cannot comprehend the answer.
2
Yes, why send astronauts into space? Because we can?
1
My little 6 yo girl loves to watch SpaceX launches, and says she wants to be a space scientist. This is quite the distraction as I try to get her to focus on her violin lessons. A moon or mars shot will only make it even harder on me.
2
For perspective, the Vietnam war going on at the same time cost $111 billion in direct costs, or roughly 3/4 of a trillion today. Which was the better expenditure?
4
Why space? The future goes in that direction.
Also, read Robert A. Heinlein's 1949 novella "The Man Who Sold The Moon". Bezos, Branson, and Musk were presaged in David Delos Harriman.
Certainly the first space program caused the US to achieve world leadership in technology. Let’s do it again.
Imagine more space shots, but imagine the longer shot too: educating poor kids to participate in the joys of science and technological discovery.
2
I can think of one person we could send immediately, with no return trip in the plan.
3
I think so, but we need an improved transportation appliance. Something along the lines of "Beam me up Scottie" would be about right.
A thoroughly cynical article, and justifiably so.
"Swashbuckling rocket oligarchs"?
Swashbuckling they are not, Magellans and Columbi they are not. They will never endure the training and privation it takes to become an astronaut
Oligarchs they are, business men to the core, counting the nickel and dime profits. The USA could have had functioning colonies on the moon by now, but short-sighted politics ruled. Now India, Russia, China want a cut of the action.
1
In my youth the Apollo program provided great inspiration to go into science. What followed after Apollo - Skylab, the ill conceived Space Shuttle, the "international" space station -- was only disappointment, with manned missions never leaving Earth orbit. I am quite old now and weary of the current anniversary 50 years later, with much empty talk of returning to the moon. America is broke and going nowhere.
3
I saw the Moon Landing in my late twenties and was a engineer lured by the space race. Turns out that putting man in space has not amounted to much in the boomer lifetime, comming to its end. Nothing is going to materialize in what remains of it and probably the next generation's. Like the search for extraterrestrial life, putting a men on Mars is of no importance to me since I won't know if happens and in any case does not seem to have any great benefit. Spend money to reduce disease and traffic is important now, not in an fantasized future. The lesson can be learned unnecessary wars, the sunk money and the dead who did not live to see the futility, Science is great, but each year mankind becomes more absurd. The universe does not need man to explore it.
6
We've been there, and done that. Let us spend we the people's money on education, health, science and technology.
6
There are diverse rationale for engaging in space exploration. A 200 Bil. expenditure for another US visit to the Moon sure needs some (far-fetched) rationale. If the exploit is for the sake of man's survival from some imminent doom than it ought to be a joint effort among other aspiring national programs...sharing benefits and costs. If the the exploit is for the sake of satisfying human curiosity than there can be questions on the expenditure for the amusement of scientists who are well paid for their 'explorations' in the comfort of their laboratories and home residence. If the exploit is for the sake of expanding the hospitality industry into space (a $50 K round trip) than it is just another money-making tourist (despoiling) celebration. If the exploit is for the sake of yet a new jaunty personal test of human endurance (Everest now too routine) than the $200 Bil. might be spent on other test if the human spirit closer to home.
The expense of the Moon program is after-all paid for by ordinary taxpayers. And it is the ordinary tax payer that is entitled to claim any benefit. Just what is the benefit to be claimed for the stand-by tax payer from that exploration?
7
The climate crisis must be our number one priority. Then, the growing gap between rich and poor.
But I’m sure if we defunded our military, we’d have plenty of money left for many other, worthwhile dreams.
5
Why go? Because even having gone before, it will capture the imaginations of young minds living through a period when the President of the United States and much of the Republican caucus are teaching science denial. We go to remember to look outward and to remind ourselves of what is possible and what is still to be done.
6
@Douglas Weil
That's been bandied about for 50 years now, and it's still lame.
1
While I personally favor space exploration for scientific knowledge and the honing of technical skills through applied solutions, there is, sadly, an explanation for the return to the moon that no one discusses openly. The moon is the ultimate military high ground in a world where more and more countries have missile capability. There is a pact that many countries have signed, agreeing not to militarize the moon, but that means little in today’s world where important deals have already been broken. Our interest in returning to the moon kicked back into gear when China, India, Japan and others developed space-faring competence. Now the race is on to claim the best locations for potential military use, as well as potential commercial use. Moon labs will be designed for science, but they will be convertible to other needs when necessary.
1
Not really, the Moon is very far compared to any Earth orbit and launching any strike from there is more complex and less energy efficient. The strikes would take days to complete instead of minutes. The Moon is also not a nice environment at all with dirt everywhere and extremes of temperature. Maybe it is a failure of my imagination but I cannot find a good scientific or military reason to establish a base on the Moon that would make sense.
6
@Hugues,
You are correct, Locavore has ignored the ballistic realities.
@Hugues If it were about conventional war, yes, but future warfare will be much more involved with controlling space. Communications and GPS satellites will be vulnerable to signal disruption and attack.
Space - the next frontier captures the rationale.
Its very hard work getting beyond the moon with manned flights; but robots on flights to planets outside the sun would be a great achievement to explore man's next opportunity.
The technological breakthroughs we need to truly take that next step will open a new set of possibilities for all of us - here on Earth and certainly out in space and on new planets.
Godspeed and good luck to the next generation pf pioneers.
3
Many technological innovations that we now take for granted grew out of the Apollo space program. Second, it is a national security issue. There is too much of our critical infrastructure in space to cede control of that domain to foreign powers alone.
@Stephen Gianelli
technical innovations? national security? critical infrastructure? Can you give any meaningful concrete examples other than war-like postures...
@Stephen Gianelli There's plenty of "critical infrastructure" in space, but none of it is anywhere near the moon.
Seeing earth-rise over the moon hardly achieved an environmental awakening. Despite continuous warnings from scientists for decades we are nonetheless in the process of destroying our only spaceship, and most likely ourselves to boot.
7
It's not as trivial as "playing with spaceships." It's fundamental to human nature and aspirations. Of course we want to see what's over the next hill. Curiosity is a fundamental trait of consciousness, maybe of life itself. We will explore space, in fits and starts with seemingly differing motives over the centuries, but really "because it's there."
5
@bounce33
it was lame 50 years ago, and that explanation is still lame. If we can't take care of the planet we live on, we have no business in outer space.
3
I was a young Air Force Officer whom the Air Force sent to MIT 1962-64. While there, I earned two masters degrees, one in Meteorology and one in Aero-Astro. My classmates in Aero-Astro included Buzz Aldrin, Ed Mitchell, and Charlie Duke, who turned out to be three of the twelve people who walked on the moon. After graduation, I spent the next two years at Goddard Space Flight Center, the NASA center for unmanned spacecraft. In 1966, I went to Vietnam to manage a ground site for a classified Air Force weather satellite. We were the go/nogo decider of which targets got bombed in the North. Most of my future career was spent in support of photographic spy satellites.
3
To me it's much more fascinating to find out about cultures different from our own and to learn of the plants and animals and other life forms elsewhere on Earth than to consider exploring essentially lifeless planets such as Mars. (Perhaps that's why most science fiction imagines life—including intelligent life—on other planets, to make them seem more interesting to visit.) Yes, humans have insatiably explored this planet, often finding places, where, displacing those who came before, a nice living can be had, but that logic doesn't work for the lifeless rocks in space. Even conquering Everest has turned into an utterly insane standing-in-line experience for the relatively rich. Sure, it might be nice to send some of those same nuts off to Mars, but not enough could go to make much difference in their supply here without doing horrible environmental damage to earth.
6
The problem is a matter of distance, time, and resources.
Humans require water, food, and breathable air. It is conceiveable that we may develop a method of suspended animation that might make human journeys of long duration possible, but perhaps not long enough.
The closest star to our sun is Proxima Centauri, a mere 4.244 light years from Earth. Even with theoretical propulsion systems that have yet to be invented, the journey might well be too long for a human to make, suspended or otherwise.
Nonetheless, investment in new technologies to explore the cosmos must continue. It would be a shame if human civilization were to be completely extinguished when our sun goes supernova.
1
@Bondosan
Most species don't last anywhere near the several billions of years it'll take the sun to go nova (not super: it's not big enough). And we're fouling our nest badly enough that we may be lucky to retain civilization for as long as we've already had it.
1
@Bondosan
Our sun is too small to go supernova. It has another 5 billion years of useful life. But all the elements heavier than lithium were created in supernovas. We humans are literally composed of stardust — and that is the truth.
I’m all for scientific research but a human is not required to be propelled into space to accomplish that. Remember that most of the things done by man on the moon could have easily done by robots, except for hitting a golf ball.
I worked on the X47B prototype, essentially a unmanned B2. It had the same weapons capacity as a B2, but being unmanned was only 1/3 the size and required only one engine.
Aerospace is the leading edge of automation, except as passengers. Humans are redundant.
15
Why get a pet? Think of how much we spend on our pets while people go hungry, while the streets are full of homeless people? A friend of mine spent thousands on their cat’s cancer treatment. That could have fed a family of four in Rwanda for a year. Why water the lawn when there are people who have no clean drinking water? I love to paint. I have spent thousands over the years on canvases and paints and brushes. What are paintings when there is someone somewhere in need. Why give your children piano lessons? That money could go to a non-profit for climate change resolutions. What’s the point of music if there’s no livable planet? Why do anything to make the world worth living? Why have passion. Curiosity? Why have art? Science?
10
No science fiction writer of the 1950's would have imagined anything like the Apollo program. The idea of launching a lunar landing attempt from the Earth's surface would have seemed ludicrous. The consensus was that space stations would be built, then deep space vehicles, then, finally, lunar landing craft.
A slow, measured approach was practically universally accepted, as the difficulty in trying to accomplish the whole thing in one attempt was comparable to climbing Mt. Everest in one day. Landing a man on the Moon was a stunt, pure and simple, a propaganda ploy.
But that does not mean that going to the Moon is worthless. In developing the technology needed to land on the moon, the microprocessor, the heart of the modern computer, was created. Without that invention, our world today would be very different. We have no idea what new technologies will come from space exploration, but we can be assured that they will come.
No other endeavor has returned so much as the Apollo program, but most of the returns have not been directly associated with the program. We don't think of the smart phone as something related to space exploration, but they would be impossible without the impetus of going to the Moon.
4
@Scott Holman
Don’t forget Velcro.
@Scott Holman
the smart phone is turning us all into robotic automatons. It's actually disconnecting us from each other...
2
What we learn in the exploration of everything there is out there
we will then return to apply here on Earth.
To explore space is to explore the possible
and we may end up learning to be kinder to each other,
so let our human spirit go forth,
sail through the heavens with daring
and lose ourselves in eternity and infinity.
it may save the human condition.
5
Finally NASA has publicly recognized the fact that the preliminary to going to Mars is going back to the moon. If they can't make it work on the moon, then forget about doing it on a place that is 142 times farther (33.9 million vs 238,900 miles).
Although I am not willing to agree with all the ethereal thoughts about man's destiny and his need to explore the cosmos, I still think that we should still go to Mars. Think about it. We spend 70 billion dollars a year on pets in the US alone. I am not saying that we should get rid of pets but going to Mars should rank at least as high as our pets.
5
This seems to imply that pets perform no useful function. Clinical studies have shown that pet owners are less depressed. Personally I get depressed as I witness science being defunded at the expense of stunt shows like pretending to go to the Moon. Remember the President does not believe in climate change but likes to show off.
Are you really asking why go to space? Well, given that we're still riding the crest of inventions from the moon landing, I'd say it's clearly an innovation machine. Given that we're about to taste the first truly widespread bitters of climate change, we'll be primed to think about our actual survival vs. reading books about it. Ultimately, there's simply too much risk in living on a single planet given the odds of something really bad happening. We need to hedge our bets. I honestly cannot think of a good reason NOT to get our buns into space in a serious way.
4
@MrsWhit
Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
186,000 miles a second. It’s not only a good idea, ITS THE LAW, as Gerald Ford said.
@MrsWhit
No, hedging your bets is not the answer. If we can't save where we are living now, we shouldn't be mucking up someplace else.
1
In this day and age we are faced with famines, global heating and devastating floods. We have the technology and the money to address these problems. Relieving human suffering should come first. When we have that under control, let's move on to more ambitious space explorations. How about a requirement that every home and building in the US have solar panels installed and those who drive can access low cost electric vehicles.
7
Without the Apollo program, computers would probably still be huge, energy hungry machines. The investment in the microprocessor has been repaid billions of times.
Our hunger for resources is driving us to destroy the only place in all that we can see. As long as we think of the Earth as a closed system, a petri dish, there will be no solutions to our problems.
Resources are abundant in our Solar System, waiting for us to exploit them. Solar power in space is strong enough to meet any industrial need. The asteroids contain almost every element found on Earth. Collecting and processing that bounty in outer space would mean shielding the planet from the pollution inherent to refining metals.
We must become adept at living and working in space, because planets make up a tiny fraction of the Cosmos. One trait of humans is that they adapt the environment to suit them, instead of adapting to the environment. We can create worlds, move them, and live on them, someday.
We need to return to the Moon to lift our eyes from the day-to-day struggle, to remind us that great things are possible. We need to return to the Moon so that we can establish observatories on the far side, shielded from the cacophony of humanity.
Our existence on Earth will end. Whether we end at that time is up to us.
2
@Scott Holman Apollo was long over when microprocessors started to be developed in earnest. Apollo spawned a lot of technology, but the interest in personal computers was a bigger driver of computer miniaturization.
1
@PeteG The timeline of development post-Apollo is beside the point, as is, to a certain extent the technology developed for the space program that ended up in our homes. The most important part of us going to space was engineering inspiration. NASA either trained or inspired an entire generation of engineers who would develop every single piece of American-developed technology in the 1970s and 1980s including the GPS system, the cell phone, the personal computer, the internet, etc. etc. etc. We have yet to recover from the loss of engineering inspiration that NASA and the space program provided, one reason why innovation has started flowing from outside the U.S. (especially those countries with more vibrant space programs such as China) and why we've been trying to get more young students interested in STEM. Without the space program and an inspirational goal – such as going to Mars – we have lost the engineering inspiration that fueled our economy.
3
@Scott Holman
Mother Nature is our one and only god. Her laws of physics are not encouraging. Let’s make Antarctica livable.
The fantastical imagination of humanity may be its largest asset and saving grace. I do not believe that it is possible to ignore the fundamental curiosity and human potential that is one of our truly universal "Treks".
5
Might need to fact check one detail: I do not believe the record or the video of the event will show Rev. Abernathy asking anyone to cancel the launch at Cape Kennedy that day. He in fact prayed for the safety of the astronauts, wished them success, and pleaded for the nation to focus its resources and attention on poverty.
2
“Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.....to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Can anyone read those words and not conjure up Captain Kirk? I grew up with those words and still get tingles. And that’s why we are forever fascinated with space travel.
6
@JWyly -- *and* Star Trek TOS. It was a frontier in itself.
1
Great question. We’ve been there in a political cold war prompted playground war. No a lot going on. No chance it’s our default habitat when we destroy earth. Gave us Tang and miniaturized technology. Time to focus the NASA brains and our tax dollars on earth and its survival.
5
@JMA -- Quite a lot of NASA's budget goes to Earth sciences.
1
A better question might be “how can we afford to?” with US government finances such a shambles.
The Bubble Economy of 2004-2007 is back with a vengeance.
5
No one went to the moon. The risk of failure was too great. After all those years of publicity build-up, splatting on the surface would have proved disastrous to America's standing. Faking it was best, that way success was assured.
1
@dbrum990 -- Reluctant to dignify your silliness, but I have a question. If the technology existed to build and launch all those rockets and satellites and landers, which billions watched, why wouldn't they go the one extra step and put one on the moon? The technology was all there. Or do you think the two Saturn V launches I was present for were a mass hallucination?
Maybe you're right and no one went to the moon but I can think of at least one who came from there.
So I suppose the Apollo 1 disaster was faked as well... er, for what reason, exactly?
1
@dbrum990
Yes they did a super job!
I am en electrical Engineer that worked in the space program in the 60" and 70's, including equipment that the astronauts took to the moon. That was a completely different time. Now I am against manned exploration of space. It does not make any rational sense. It can be done cheaper and better with robots and technology. Imprison individuals in space ships that can malfunction is the definition of insanity. You want to see astronauts dying on CNN for weeks? To embark on this mission because of of Trump or Pence is madness. By the way the greatest explorers in history were the Spaniards and Portuguese in the 16th century, and they did it with 60 foot carabelas with sails, no radar , just human virtues. Do you know that Magallanes and Sebastian Elcano discovered the Estrecho de Magallanes and Elcano was the first to cross the unknown Pacific Ocean, the China Sea, the Indian Ocean, cross the Cabo de Buena Esperanza and returned to Spain 3 years later?
7
It seems like the early explorers were really crazy to set sail on those small ships. Perhaps they should have thought rationally and stayed home.
1
Neil Armstrong's "one giant leap for mankind" was a Cold War publicity stunt. Sound and fury signifying nothing, to use Faulkner's words. It was, nonetheless, amazing. A tight-rope act without a safety net. You couldn't turn away.
But there is no habitat for human beings beyond the earth's biosphere. Never will be. The Apollo astronauts took a little piece of earth with them, but nothing they did was sustainable. They had to come home quickly, before they ran out of stuff. The International Space Station needs to be constantly resupplied (from the earth's surface, which is only 250 miles away).
We are no more able to leave the earth than to escape the time constraints imposed by birth and death. We are not gods.
11
@Howard
"Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" is Shakespeare. Macbeth.
3
simple answer: the planet is dying, at this rate we won't be able to stop it in time, so moving into space is the best way to ensure our survival
1
@new yorker
wasteful isn't it. cheap--throw it away. use it up and move on.
That attitude of carelessness does not deserve to move somewhere else.
2
Thank you so much for asking the question that the aerospace-military complex doesn't want asked.
If everything here on the one planet we're sure has life on it was absolutely perfect, maybe our species would have justification for the vast amounts of money, pollution, and other investments it makes in launching hunks of metal out of earth orbit.
Of course, the space race is mostly about military advantage and seeing if we can plunder nearby planets and asteroids for resources, or to put humans on them after we've destroyed our only home, the earth.
The whole thing is one big human hubris ego pride folly, subsidized by billions of tax dollars, and propagandized by sci-fi movies that make it seem cool.
I love the photos our probes have taken of Saturn's rings and Jupiter. Other than that, we need to stop wasting fuel, money, lives and energy on objects in space, and stop anthropogenic mass extinction before we create a dead planet where there was once a living one!!!
9
@Steve Davies
well said! thank you for that!!
2
Overbye is wrong when he writes that the sun will boil the oceans in 500 million years. Wrong. Try 5.5 Billion years. As for human space travel, it's a waste of money and lives. Robots do a better job, at lower cost, and more efficiently.
6
@Howard -- The number may not be 500 million because it may be considerably less. With the build up of moisture in the air, temperatures on the surface will, in cosmic terms, quickly make life unsustainable. That could be in as little as 100,000 years, or as much as 200 million. Your 5.5 billion is the time to sun death. Waaay long before that the earth will be a charcoal briquette. BYO lighter fluid.
3
@Stevenz A nice review of all the ways life could end on Earth was produced by the BBC recently, quoting various scientists. The earliest the sun would fry the Earth ranges from 1-5 Billion years. At the 500 million year mark, some geoscientists think CO2 levels could be reduced so low that most plant life would be starved of this needed molecule, thus disrupting the food web. Between 5 and 7.5 billion years, the sun will expand and engulf the orbit of the Earth as it turns into a red giant. Regarding buildup of moisture in the air, it was much warmer during the Jurassic and CO2 was much higher than today, and yet life persisted. This topic would make a great discussion course for students.
1
Space exploration is no longer solely conducted by government agencies. Numerous partnerships have formed over the years with private entities. The likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin would like to go to the moon and mars (and beyond), with humans aboard.
I firmly believe that there is no reason we cannot do both: save the earth and explore space with humans. We have the resources and the technology. The one key element that we seem to struggle with is political will.
5
@Andre Hoogeveen. Actually we don't have the resources. We have a. bottom tier of Americans who don't know where the next meal is coming from. Oh the Dollar Store. Everyone else who is not a billionaire is deep in debt. If we can't take care of Americans on planet Earth, we have no business spending billions on luxury travel to space.
3
@Andre Hoogeveen
We absolutely do not have the resources. Did you read the article? And we're struggling with technology for manned space travel
All those non-governmental entities are in it for the prestige and profit.
1
Wouldn't it make more sense to create some trains in the Northeast that run on time? Maybe some clean water in Flint, Michigan? Or maybe, just maybe, rebuild Puerto Rico?
12
If you're going to spend a trillion dollars, you should consider it an investment, with a plan for how it will bring a good return, preferably one that pulls our fat out of the fire in which we find ourselves at this moment. This 20/20 hindsight of how the Apollo program paid so many benefits to terrestrial science and tech is rubbish. That wasn't planned. It just came about. We need dreams, like extracting water and energy from thin air, not more military/industrial grotesques.
7
But for the existential crisis presented by Global Warming, this dream might be of interest, yet primarily for robots and not humans.
Trump's urgency to make the manned space flight by the end of his second administration is similar to his wish to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, just a narcissistic fool's authoritarian demand.
However, if it is not completed by 2024, the demolition of our Eden of Earth will be well underway and funds will be needed to repair damage to an overheated and overpopulated Earth. How many starving and dying humans do we think it might take to transfer funds from manned space flight to repair flooded cities and locate food to eat --here on earth.
Oh yes, it can and is going to happen with Yuge levels of certainty unless we remove the fools from office that firmly believe they can squeeze more dollars out of the system for their own greed rather than admit what they already know. Global Warming is not a hoax created by the Chinese.
10
@dpaqcluck
My guess is the next 50 years will be fantastic growth of artificial intelligence. Maybe some kindly robots will keep humans as pets.
@JSK
yes, well AI is just that. Artificial.
1
Why do we ever try to go anywhere we haven't been before, or do anything that we haven't done? As our technology becomes more impressive, our expansion across the surface of the Earth more complete, our exploitation of the Earth's resources more exhaustive, space inevitably becomes the last place left to invest our creative energies. The final frontier, as it was aptly put.
The plain fact is that humanity either expands into space or we die. There is no alternative.
4
We may go to Mars if the entire developed world helps finance it.
It would be a pure vanity project, however.
But that would mark the end of men landing on other celestial bodies.
Everything else is even more inhospitable or too far away.
Or am I missing something here?
1
@Kenneth Johnson
I don't think you are the one missing something. To the contrary, it is the others who are missing something.
2
The disappointment with Apollo, and why we're having this particular discussion, is that it was an end, not a beginning. Usually, when a new frontier is crossed, a new technology is born, a new standard is reached, humans keep going. We build faster planes, healthier cities, more efficient heaters, increased computing power. But with space? No, we reached a goal and came to a screeching halt. After that, it was all about commercialisation, not exploration, even cancelling missions already under construction.
I was - and am - a huge believer in human exploration of space. The space programme of the 60s and early 70s inspired hundreds of millions. But I think if they had been told then that the moon would be the last stop a lot of people wouldn't have been so willing to spend their money.
Yes, going to the moon was the right thing to do. But perhaps we did it for the wrong reasons.
6
On July 20, 1968 I was a Peace Corps Volunteer looking up at the moon with my neighbors in the impoverished rural land reform settlement in the Dominican Republic where I was working as a community organizer. We had no electricity. Meals were cooked on charcoal fires. Women and girls carried our untreated drinking water from the river half a mile away on their heads. We listened to the news of the moon landing on newly popular Japanese transistor radios powered by flashlight batteries. It was a clear night and I remember how bright the moon was and also how dissonant it seemed that I was sitting there in that place while some of my countrymen were up there walking on the moon. I remembered reading that the annual budget for the Peace Corps at that time was less than the cost of the jettisoned fuel tanks for the first stage rocket that boosted our astronauts to the moon. Both the space program and the Peace Corps were products of American idealism and the Cold War. The Peace Corps still exists, although the number of Volunteers working around the world is half what it was in the 1960s. The Peace Corps gets enough qualified applicants and credible requests for Volunteers from foreign countries to easily double its size if it had a larger budget. Instead, its budget was cut again this year. With a billion people still subsisting on less than $2 a day and two billion still without access to clean water, when I look up at the moon this July 20th, it will still seem dissonant.
11
I listened to the director of NASA on NPR this evening and thought ‘yes I can remember where I was, when my parents woke me up to watch the
Moon walk’. I was part of that generation.
But now, it just seems like a criminal waste of money to consider going back when there is so much need here on earth.
Use those billions to transition to a sustainable renewable energy grid, to ensure quality healthcare for all, to wage peace and prosperity in troubled areas, to secure nutritious sufficient food for all, to rebuild our aging infrastructure. Use those billions to build a more peaceful, equitable future for all.
There is no need to go back to the
Moon. Been there, done that, but we have grown up now. We have bigger work to do.
13
There's some fairly consequential problems facing us in colonizing any other planets, the main one being the closest exoplanet we know of is 4 Light Years away. That means 4 years of traveling at the Speed of Light, about 300 million meters per second. A probably unattainable speed for any living organism.
We desperately need the same brilliant people who work at NASA and other space programs to help us design systems that will help us survive a continually growing inhospitable home planet. More efficient solar energy cells, air filtration systems, farming and hydroponics systems, food processing, radiation protection, etc. etc. Right here on Earth, our home planet that has everything we need, but in finite quantities.
We already know what's on Mars, and many of our other Solar System neighbors. Uninhabitable environments. We need our smartest people, which is a precious resource, to help us learn to sustain ourselves here, or traveling to another planet to practice our gluttonous consumptive ways is just not a proper use of those resources.
4
We should go because it is the next frontier. We will learn along the way and be better for it. You can play with anything including space ships, but to insinuate it is purely frivolous to venture into space lacks vision, boldness, and imagination. Some of the people who go will die. Others will live and thrive. All of the pioneers will be taking risks. Their energy and optimism will push the whole endeavor forward and eventual success. A little bit like those who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific to help form the USA!
5
@Blorphus And what a big success it’s been!
@Blorphus
you know what's really frivolous? Letting Planet Earth go to wrack and ruin, but looking forward to "the next big thing like a real pioneer" Sad.
It's funny that if we actually had a world like the one envisioned by people like AC Clark way back when, and people today were routinely being piloted to colonies on Mars and beyond and back again, it would all just be business as usual and we would be working to replace all the people in the colonies and on the spaceships with machines to lower costs.
4
So what will the ALICE project do? Distract. Funnel money into already wealthy companies. Help us forget our humanity.
4
a scenario in which ..
we`re desperately trying to find another planet to host humanity's future ...because we`ve just about despoiled our own planet..is not a pretty picture..
And i sincerely hope we solve the most pressing environmental and social problems... here at home ..
or we`d just be spreading dysfunction across the stars ..
but i believe
if we do survive
across the stars ...we are bound
6
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere...
But space travel can't ease the pressure on a planet grown too crowded not even with today's ships and probably not with any future ships-because stupid people won't leave the slopes of their home volcano even when it starts to smoke and rumble. What space travel does do is drain off the best brains: those smart enough to see a catastrophe before it happens, and with the guts to pay the price-abandon home, wealth, friends, relatives, everything-and go. That's a tiny fraction of one percent. But that's enough. - Robert Heinlein
I will take Robert Heinlein's one percent over the one percent we have today anytime.
3
Then make haste and go. I’ll stay here and work to repair this world.
1
@Vanessa Hall
It won't be any better there. If you destroy your life in one place, you'll do it everywhere.
Robert Heinlein knew the technical stuff, but he was, after all, a science fiction writer.
1
@Vanessa Hall
It won't be any better there. If you destroy your life in one place, you'll do it everywhere.
What I find to be fascinating , The Times did NOT reference one historical point, The Drowning of the young woman on Marthas Vinyard, whilst the lunar landing was occurring......
2
@Tony -- Why is that more fascinating *in this context* than any of the other two or three unrelated events on that day? I'm sure you can find an article somewhere that let's you stoke your political angst about that one.
1
Why send humans into space? Please ask Christopher Columbus.
2
Please ask the native descendants how well that worked out for them.
Columbus was no hero and never even found North America. He was a nobody. The Norse actually found what we call America.
5
@Tom To open up trade with the Indies?
2
@Tom
Wow! I never knew that Christopher Columbus went into space (smile)
I grew up on the Space Coast of Florida and have been a space enthusiast for as long as I can remember. But lately I find myself rethinking the space program for two reasons. One, there are such vast unmet needs in the world, and spending billions on space flight seems frivolous at best and immoral at worst. And two, I really don't think we need to propagate our species beyond Earth. It seems fairly obvious that humans are a destructive invasive species. We don't really deserve another planet.
10
How do you rank spending billions on Big Macs at McDonalds on the frivolity/morality scale? This is a rich country, capable of many noble achievements. There are many ways to feed the soul.
2
I can't help thinking of the Borgs in that Star Trek movie. They traveled space going from planet to planet because they extracted all the resources from each planet, then moving on to the next,ruining every planet they touched.
7
Nothing comes close to the absolute awe in finding new discoveries in outer space. The search for life being paramount.
USA has taxpayers funding a military that could destroy the entire planet a thousand times over but are bent out of shape to use a tiny percentage of taxpayer money for space exploration. Not to mention all the experiments that are done in tandem with many of the projects that are for the good of earthlings.
26
@Hal
I totally disagree with your first paragraph. But the second has merit.
2
Think of all the good we could do if we focused these resources on our urgent earthly problems.
8
@MN
Yes! What is the point of spending billions to go the moon or Mars or Jupiter's moons? We cannot live on any of them. When we develop the capability to travel to earth-like planets, it might be worth a try.
Although as others have said, would we wind up ruining the whole universe?
4
Space is not the final frontier, it is the next one. How beautiful is our solar system? Let's go!
7
Some things are supremely useless and totally worth doing. Manned space flight, sailing single-handed around the world and climbing Mount Everest without oxygen are just some of them. They lift the spirit and remind us that there is more in life than gluing our eyes to screens or watching pointless sport.
5
We already have plenty of problems here on Earth that deserve better attention than playing space explorer. People are dying from Climate Change, Poor Nutrition, Curable diseases, unnecessary military conflicts, etc. Let's get real and set our own house in order first.
6
Absolutely, we need to go into space. Perhaps a base on the moon from which to explore other planets. Why not?? The human race has always been explorers, sometimes with very bad results for the indigenous population but look at the new worlds opened. We explored the earth now is the time to explore space. Imagine all the knowledge out there that is ours to gain. Another reason, I think a determined course of action in exploring space will bring us together. We are Americans - we can do anything.
9
@Doris Keyes
Sigh. I can't think of anything more improbable than those reasons.
3
We should go because it's our nature. We're explorers. It's why humans took to the seas in flimsy wooden boats, toiled their way over frozen mountains and crossed endless expanses of empty desert. We need to go, we need to see, we need to explore.
The innovations necessary to put a crew on the surface of Mars would have endless applications to other problems here on Earth. The science a small team could conduct if they were present on the surface of another world is vastly beyond what an unmanned probe can accomplish.
Cowardice and small thinking keep us here, penned in by global problems - problems that seem too big to solve. Maybe what we need most is to look at them from a fresh perspective - maybe a few million miles away?
Why else should we go? Well, I'd really like to ski Olympus Mons.
10
The vast majority of humanity never has been and probably never will be explorers.
We don’t define something by its exception. We define it by its generality.
Most of us are too busy keeping a roof over our heads and keeping bellies full to consider such frivolous endeavors.
3
How sad and small so many of our lives have become. Your post points this out. In our inner, deepest hearts, we are all explors!
Quit you job tomorrow! Explore the world.
I dare you.
4
@IAmAlive
I'm going to, though it won't be tomorrow. When I've finished my medical training (and satisfied the other requirements), I'm joining Doctors Without Borders.
4
It's yesterday's dream
It belongs to the era of World's Fairs, cartoons like The Jetsons, the steampunk age of automatons and flying cars. Going to the moon again is a bit silly. Right now, every human being can talk to any other human being on the planet, and share endless amounts of information with them. We got our miracle. We should build on that.
8
$25 billion /$150 billion today for 842 pounds of rocks.
Sounds like a great deal to me.
Seriously, we need to keep money here to help those in the here and now.
Not waste money on a ridiculous theory of Soviet expansion called the domino theory that never would have happened.
2
@Patrick Campbell-
There was something to be gained by going in 1964-1974. The world situation was completely different.
And we especially weren't in the mortal peril we are now.
I think Eisenhower was right that it was nuts to spend that kind of money as the article references. And yes he lived in that time period, too.
If we are in peril it is largely due to self inflicted wounds which provide no good reason for any sympathy.
We made our bed and now it’s time to lie in it. No matter how bad it gets. Because we earned it. And we should suffer the consequences of climate change and overpopulation.
Let it all end.
1
@Steve Singer
are you kidding me? We almost nuked the world out of existence.
There is no money for affordable health care but plenty for this fantasy space exploration and wars. This is the Republican ideology waist money on this but not on its people.
2
Imagine if billionaires like Bezos and Musk spent their fortunes solving environmental problems instead of toying with space.
5
@Josh Wilson
Okay. Those fortunes would be gone in a year or two, and the environmental problems would barely be dented.
3
@Josh Wilson - Didn't Musk come up with a pretty nice electric vehicle that requires no fossil fuels to run??
3
tom, an electrical vehicle plugs into a wall socket that gets its energy from... mostly coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy.
2
Anyone who has had a hard drive fail without first making a backup knows the answer to this question. If that isn’t clear ask a dinosaur.
12
It has always been patently obvious that space is far too hostile for human survival. In spite of NASA propaganda, we can fritter away untold billions of dollars and lots of lives on science fiction fantasies or we can fix the existential threats we have imposed on our own planet.
6
@Someone else I agree with you.
2
(A) Because we want to.
(B) Because we are doomed as a species if we don't inhabit more than one world, as many have repeatedly pointed out.
6
Supporting a noble effort such as going to the moon with new research goals would be great if we weren’t already wasting a trillion dollars a year for endless, tragic wars and lining the pockets of many profiteers in the process. All our foreign ( and domestic) priorities need an overhaul.
4
@Ellen I agree.
Humans will continue to search for answers to what is out there in the universe or multi-verse, etc., no matter what. The fact that those answers will only create more questions is part of the fun.
4
I align with Democrats on most things, but apparently space isn’t one of them. It amazes me how the party who rhetorically dedicates themselves to science and discovery completely disregards the life changing technologies and research our space program produced in the brief time it was allowed. It amazes me how short sighted we’ve become.
Yes we absolutely have problems on earth that need to be solved, but many of those problems can be solved on expedited timelines if we were to properly fund our space program.
It’s not just about “prancing around” in space to plant a flag and play the anthem. There’s an army of scientists behind the scenes making that happen, and a myriad of technologies developed that had very real impacts on our daily lives.
I expected better from us.
21
@Seán I think we should work at our own planet first, regarding climate change. But, going along with you, I have thought that maybe the science behind any space travel might produce some science for solving this warming planet.
3
Lynne, science from space travel has already done this and will continue.
5
It's all about exploration and unfortunately, conquer.
I watched, as a nine year-old, the astronauts land and dance on the moon. We were mesmerized.
If continued space exploration benefits mankind, great.
I remain a cynic and doubt that. (Sorry, Jeff Bezos, but I work for you, and I do not think that you have anything of such venture in your plan.)
I have grandchildren that will work on fixing our so beautiful, but so sick planet. What I can do is continue to instruct them on how very good it is if you administer to what it needs.
2
It was politics that put us on the Moon.
No, politics were merely the catalyst. All the ingredients for moon travel were already there. One only needs a cursory study of biology to know that with sufficient nutrition and conditions all living things ultimately fill all its space. All living things seek out, and fill, empty spaces. In a closed system, every living organism will fill every space available. Humankind included. Earth is a closed system humans are quickly filling, every last space including the polar regions.
Space and the Moon represent the ultimate in emptiness needing filling. Infinite space represents infinite life, life everlasting, no matter what happens in the relatively immediate Earth future. Why we go to the Moon. Baby steps to distant tomorrows.
6
@dmaurici
Humans are not "filling every available space". They are destroying every available space
A 1990 Toyota has more technology than Apollo 11. With today’s technology and AI, one can argue that we can go further faster and cheaper with unmanned remote controlled spacecraft without risking human life. In fact that has already been demonstrated. When the time comes for humans to travel, it will be obvious. We are not there yet.
5
To have a member of our species set foot on another planet would be a great achievement. I’m 45 years old. My guess is I won’t see it.
2
I we give up on going to space, “we might as well all buy SUV’s and move to the beach.”
1
How about they return to remove all the trash they left on the moon?
2
The manned space program, including the moon landing, was pure jingoism. It was very effective in establishing the US technical superiority over the USSR and reinforcing the Mutually Assured Deterrent that ended the nuclear arms race. However, it provided far less scientific and technical benefit than the unmanned space program, despite all the jingoistic breast beating.
Let it go. Bask in the glory.
3
@RFM Sorry but no. We need to explore, we need to travel to the farthest reaches of the universe.
7
1. Because we need a Plan B in case everything here gets even more fouled up.
2. Fate. Our history is hundreds of thousands of years of pushing into the unknown. It's going to happen, sooner or later. Let's do it rationally, though.
PS - I support the Green Dream. It's the Apollo Project for this generation. To the naysayers, know that the logic and drive expressed JFK's speeches about Apollo map directly onto the challenges of accomplishing the Green Dream. Let's do it.
4
@J P
"1. Because we need a Plan B"
Excellent idea! Let's get started - it should be easy to figure out a way to move billions of people from this planet to somewhere "nicer."
Robots are becoming more efficient explorers of space - and a lot cheaper than humans - than ever before.
Humans are fragile and less expendable.
When humanity is ready to set up shop and start terraforming a new home out in the stars, that will be the time to risk lives.
4
@Bobby Clobber Yeah, why do we have to do this now? Like me wanting to buy a Wahoo bike computer for my bike, why do I have to do it now? Why don't I wait till I can afford it and why can't we wait? The US is in debt? Why don't we work at getting rid of all the plastic in the oceans, for example? There is so much that should be done on Earth, why spend money putting another man on the moon now? Let's do our dishes here and clean our dirty laundry on Earth before spending money on going to the moon again.
3
It's disheartening to see many comments pushing a false dichotomy where solving environmental problems on Earth automatically rules out manned space missions as if the two were mutually exclusive. For all we know future space exploration and research may end up solving some of our problems here on Earth.
17
@Sigh
While you're fantasizing, try to imagine any sort of exploration that would require actual humans to accomplish.
2
@Sigh
It didn't happen then, and it's not going to happen now.
2
I think you vastly underestimate the success of the space program since the Apollo days. Scientifically speaking, it has been far more valuable to send unmanned missions to explore the planets and the heavens. The Hubble telescope was a spectacular example, and even then the space shuttle was key to launching and servicing it. We've had several rovers on Mars that have taught us a lot and several missions of the outer planets and their moons. Mars is only one of these planets, but the only one could feasibly visited by humans. And the costs and requirements for safety would have slowed experimentation and discovery considerably.
4
Here's what I call "The Duh moment" when it is possible to realize that our biggest challenge will be to survive the next hundred years back here on Earth. Global warming and mass extinctions are what we need to worry about and plan for. Floods, fire, drought, famine, and new world wars. That's what we need to prevent or ameliorate, that's what will more than occupy our greatest minds. Every dollar we spend on space exploration is a dollar that doesn't go to saving the Earth. I had my "Duh moment" years ago. I hope you have yours soon.
7
@Charles Justice - I think I can safely say that it is impossible for me to survive another hundred years even if the earth became a Garden of Eden overnight. I lose very little sleep worrying about what ocean levels could be by the year 2050 because I would have to outlive every single relative by ten years to do that. I am much more concerned with Social Security going broke in the next 15 years.
1
I lose a lot of sleep worrying about what Earth will be like for my grandchildren when they grow up. But that's just me -- I generally think of others first before myself.
3
@tom harrison, I don't know about you but I value human civilization. I think the human being is a beautiful creature and it would be beyond tragedy to see our species go extinct. It's not just about sea level rising. We can do better, and we must.
3
Why send humans into space?
Why send people on small wooden sailing ships beyond an unexplored horizon?
Space truly is the final frontier. While the problems of propulsion, cosmic radiation, artificial gravity, and others are formidable they are not insurmountable.
We need to travel throughout our solar system and beyond.
The real challenge will be how we can improve the human condition while exploring space.
Despite current events, I believe we will one day cooperate as a species to successfully explore this final frontier and be ready to play nice with other sentient life we may encounter.
14
@Sentinel98 A want, not a need
4
@Sentinel98 We don't "need" to travel throughout our solar system and beyond. It's a choice. If we don't do it, we'll be fine.
3
The Vikings and Columbus didn’t “need” to cross the Atlantic... yet here we all are.
2
I, personally, would prefer the robotic exploration of space over "self-driving" vehicles on our modern day highway system. That said, sometime in the future, the moon, like Antarctica, may prove valuable economically and, potentially, a place from where power might be projected. Whether by government agencies such as NASA or private enterprise, the future of both will come with geopolitical realities.
Because one does not see the viability of space exploration does not mean that others, possibly with differing idealisms, may think otherwise. Watching the current growth of international interests in space programs, I'm not so sure this is a good time to be "putting ones head in the sand". There is going to be a future in space and scientific exploration and we will have to be in it if we're going to be in it.
7
@Charles
That's not a very good reason. Let someone else take on the exploration for a change. Why does everything have to be a contest, and why do we always have to be first?
Grand hubris.
2
@kris
If the contest were the number of negative posts critical of other's views on this, you win, hands down.
The country runs out of money to pay the bills in early September, and so, no, we don't need to spend money going to space, when we can't pay for the roads, bridges, healthcare, and entitlement spending that has been promised by Congress for the next 30 years here on earth.
14
The entire practicum of space exploration comes down to political will. If there is power to be gained by the adventure it will happen. Without something like a cold war and will to waste lives and resources again I doubt we will go to Mars.
The private sector can make an industry out of satellite launches, maybe some tourist folly too, but a 3 year round trip to Mars is orders of magnitude more difficult and risky. Where is the profit in that?
Cathedrals were popular forms of expression that served the same purpose as space flights: demonstrating hegemony of a ruling class. We haven't built any Gothic cathedrals and even rebuilding Notre Dame looks only marginally likely. Why? Because cathedrals are no longer functional as vehicles of political power.
Rockets aren't effective vehicles of power either, after all we get most of our space buzz from FX based movies. I think folks would get more mileage out of a good pro basketball dynasty anyway.
2
Cant' we leave something alone? We don't need to go to the moon. It was nice that we went one time, but that's enough. Leave space alone.
10
Manned missions are far costlier than unmanned missions. But going to space is a no-brainer... it is war and ever-bloating defense spending that we have to stop. The space program has brought dividends. Defense spending creates vast arsenals of death, that at best will never be used -- that money, once spent, hardly circulates in the economy, and has the lowest multiplier effect.
We did marvelous work with robots on Mars. And as you point out, the space perspective has solidified the fact that we share a fragile planet together, and must tend our only home carefully, and peacefully -- or perish. And Carl Sagan's speech on the Pale Blue Dot earth image rings powerfully true, today as ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5FwsblpT8
8
Let's ask a physicist rather than rely on sentimental pap like "must go...it's our destiny."
"Unfortunately, there is a kind of puerile fascination with people in space that is causing countries—Russia, the United States—to spend vast sums on putting people into space. The President of the United States has a new initiative to go back to the Moon and then go on to Mars at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars—perhaps nearly a trillion dollars. Well, this may have some justification in terms of excitement, I mean, after all, we support football and the Olympics, all sorts of things, but don’t call it science. Don’t confuse it with science. That’s the Disney version of science. Real science consists of people on Earth sending unmanned satellites up, or doing observations on the surface of the Earth and at their desks painfully working out the implications of this. People can be sent up into space and hit a few golf balls around on the surface of the Moon...that’s all fine if you like that kind of spectacle, but it has nothing to do with scientific research." —Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in physics.
17
@David Illig Thanks, as a scientist I concur wholeheartedly.
4
Please. Is he a rocket scientist? No. He’s a theoretical physicist who called the international space station a flying “turkey”. Well, there are many who are drinking clean water today because of the filtration experiments they learned on the space station. From eye surgery advances to improving indoor air quality to finding ways to prevent bone loss, and even in advances in breast cancer detection, there have been many benefits that we have here on earth because we have men and women in space (well, low orbit). And we continue to learn. They are up there doing experiments 24/7.
3
@Martini
oh hey, I know some rocket scientists who don't approve either. Those things you speak of would exist by now anyway. And in any case, they are not helping Major Problems the planet is now having.
2
If you have to ask why you really do not understand humanity. Argue waste and folly all you want, but it is in our nature to explore, to learn and just "go out there". Michael Collins was astounded to hear people from all over the world say not that "America did it, but that we did it."
23
@T Kelly
But we have grown up now, and realize that a lot of that was just feel-good fiction. I happened to be in another country at the time and my host family made me get up at 3 in the morning to watch it. I was underwhelmed.
3
Why go? Because we gotta get off this rock.
6
Re: '...Most earthlings alive today were not yet around when humans landed on the moon..."
I was!!
For lack of a better word...it was a 'glorious' treat, reminiscent of the actor's expressions in the 'G.I.E.C.O.' commercial where the oil-techs 'discover' ice cream...with sprinkles!!
I watched EVERY femptosecond of this achievement as it unfolded, and I was / am proud, (to near 'hubris'!), to have been alive as my species 'initial' efforts to become a space-faring / multi-planet species happened...right, before my very eyes!
BTW: I view conspiracy theorist's claims of 'faked' Space.Ops exactly the same way I view 'flat earthers' and...Holocaust- / climate-change- / creationist's denialism / nihilism!
*{Femptosecond: smallest, yet defined unit of time measurement. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtosecond}
Because we are making a mess of this planet.
@WE Oh good. We're making a mess of this planet, so let's go make a mess of the moon and all other planets we come across. Makes great sense.
2
I find unmanned space exploration and the significant discoveries it has made to be important and wonderful. I admire the bravery of the astronauts, but manned space exploration leaves me cold. The discoveries manned exploration have made seemed fewer, particularly when compared to the much greater cost than unmanned. Maybe the reason that I'm not a fan of manned exploration is not when the first moon landing occurred, I was a college student and the Vietnam War was destroying American lives and society. In that environment, I just couldn't get excited about the 1969 moon landing and still can't.
6
File this under wouldn’t it be nice..
If we went back to the moon meant “we” not America but a truly global effort with different countries. The apollo landings of course had a level of international help but as has been said were a reaction to the Cold War and fear. Only afterwards were they seen as a mankind achievement.
Every country focused on a positive global goal, to prove it could be done and then to repeat it for the things that need global cooperation here on earth...
Yes I know ... but let me dream just for the length of the this post.
1
Bravo! This is one of the greatest articles on the subject I read in a long time.
As a teenager I was glued to the TV set to watch the first landing. It was a feat unprecedented in our history! A real, visible, comprehensible first. No doubt about it. And since the human enterprise is not zero-sum game, there would have been enough money left around to feed the hungry.
Why will humans keep trying to venture into space?
....because it's a challenge, we are curious, craving for answers, and nothing beats seeing with our own eyes.
12
To all those who say we need an alternative to Earth: the most obvious problem with the idea of space colonization is that if we had the means to make a planet inhabitable, the easiest and cheapest planet to test this on would be earth. Eg stopping climate change is peanuts in comparison to making another planet's atmosphere ok for humans.
So it's the other way around: space colonization is not a solution to earth's problems, but fixing our planet is a prerequisite for colonizing another planet.
OTOH space exploration is, indeed, just like art. We do it because it's so human to want to know, and explore, create and imagine.
4
@passer-by
You nailed it except for the last sentence. Then you blew it.
Expensive? The House just passed a $733 billion defense bill.
6
We will go to space because we must. It is our destiny.
We will go to space because we have conquered the surface of the Earth, and our destiny drives us on. The same urges that drove us from East Africa 200,000 years ago to dominate the planet compel us to look up and out.
Perhaps not tomorrow, but someday, if we survive our current environmental crises, we will be spacefaring. It is in our nature to explore.
We will use robots scout the way, and to do the science, but once we improve our technology to the point where man can survive in space, we will go.
We must do this with the understanding that Earth is our home, and we are adapted to Earth. Mars is not habitable, and the stars are too far away to comprehend. We must save our planet, but the worlds of the Solar System do beckon, and we will visit.
5
@Fred Your comment sounds like a re-run of Manifest Destiny. Not convincing to me and you'll have to at least one up with a semi-logical reason. Why don't we cure the current planet we live on?
2
@Fred "... once we improve our technology to the point where man can survive in space, we will go..."
Once we genetically modify humans so that they can live at 900°F and -250°F, don't need oxygen or food, and can withstand a lifetime of exposure to hard radiation. In other words, this fantasy is not going to be realized. Star Trek is fiction and will remain fiction.
12
I understand the fascination with outer space, and planets other than fragile Earth.
But I think it's unconscionable to spend the amount of money we do spend in places other than here.
Infrastructure all over the country is falling apart, unsafe drinking water in Flint (just to name one place), obscene health care costs everywhere. Education?
If nothing else, how about we take care of Earth's own environment before we go destroying it around the solar system?
6
@c,
Every penny spent on the moon landing was spent on Earth, in the US, and paid to American companies. I remember the 60s. Unemployment was low and the economy was very strong.
2
@c
Since the Apollo program wound down in 1975, the U.S. has spent a maximum of 1.05% of GDP on space. For FY2017, it was 0.47%.
If we zeroed that out, how big a dent would the repurposed funds make in our problems? Not much of one, I think.
3
The practical reason to go to space is related to one of the reasons not to go to space — it’s a harsh and unrelenting place, where every molecule of air and water and every watt of energy must be used efficiently and recycled if possible.
These are the same needs as those of us stuck on Earth. I believe sending humans to space greatly enhances our ability to work with our environment and advance solutions to problems here as well.
I think the idea of unmanned science is valuable as well, but I think some amount of anti-human space travel by unmanned exploration advocates is cynical — they worry that manned missions will detract from their unmanned missions. I don’t think it has to be a zero sum game.
5
Not mentioned in this excellent piece is that some of the original geopolitical motivations for the early space program are suddenly back in play, as China, India and other nations begin sending probes to the Moon. Is the U.S. going to watch as other nations settle there and create bases, claim territory, etc.? China's recent probe landing on the Moon's dark side is only the first of many such events. While Musk, Bezos and other billionaires are working hard to push Americans back into space as a commercial venture, the U.S. government has to play a major role, or other nations will fill that gap and claim the rewards.
3
@Hardbull
Don't worry. They're just doing it because the U.S. did it. They're going to find out it is money basically wasted.
We have done incredible things with the unmanned program. Visited much of the solar system for much cheaper. Wanting to send humans into space has more to do with science fiction and PR than science. Let's continue to explore our neighbors with machines, while we make life more live able here on earth for regular humans and the other species we share the planet with. We aren't going anywhere, so we should make sure this space ship works before we send anybody out there again.
8
@Al Good thinking.
1
"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
27
@Bill
Also the discovery of water on the moon for habitation and the lower gravity well of the moon allowing for manufacturing in lunar orbit.
2
@Bill of course, take any challenge 'cause "We-re Number One!!!' regardless of how little logic is in the cause.
4
@Bill
did you read the article? He pulled the wool over our eyes...
1
I liked as many of the comments that said we should amp up the manned space program (& for all the reasons they cited) as those who said we shouldn't (for all the reasons they stated).
There's no one more romantic about space travel than I am. While I grew up during the 60s & 70s I read sci-fi novels about space travel (by Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, etc.) & followed the Apollo program with great interest. Watching men walk on the moon was a truly awe-inspiring event.
But we have more important matters to attend to now as a species & in our country: the climate crisis, providing healthcare to everyone, the illegal immigrant crisis, reforming our corrupt government, etc.
Besides, NASA has continued to provide awe-inspiring experiences with robotic missions to Pluto, Saturn, Jupiter, & Mars. These cheaper missions that put no human lives at risk should continue. For those who are interested & for the pure science of it, they'll get the job done.
Furthermore, let's welcome the private sector's venture into space travel. They can do much of the R & D that'll be necessary to eventually send people back to the moon & to Mars.
Taking the long pov, if we can solve some of the dire problems we're currently facing, then we can think about spending the huge amounts that manned space flight requires. We, as a species, will have to do this eventually, but there's no rush.
Meanwhile, I'm watching the Apollo shows on TV & marveling all over again at that incredible accomplishment.
6
@JediProf Thanks for your comment. I agree.
We don't know how soon but the earth will be hit by a rock big enough to shroud the earth for years. With no sunlight all large animal life will die including humans. That's not science fiction or wild speculation. We need a lifeboat.
5
@James Symon. It would be nice if we stopped fouling the mothership before we start looking for lifeboats.
6
@Al No argument. One is slow strangulation. The other is instant death. We need to do both even if it means dividing resources. With a real push we might get a lifeboat on the moon within 50 -100 years. Mars? Much longer. Multiplying the rock's low imminent probability times total annihilation of the human race (infinity) tells you it must be done.
Maybe what we hope to learn on distant planets can be answered right here on earth. Isn't the earth created out of the same "Big Bang"? We're still learning what is in our deepest oceans and below them. So much that needs to be done to save our jewel of a planet that has air, water, and mostly habitable temperatures.
1
I must say I found the title of this article "Is to Time To Play With Spaceships Again" very disheartening. America and Russia were locked in a heated Cold War battle over space itself. There was a genuine fear that if the Russians got to the moon first what was to stop them from using it as a base to launch nuclear bombs at Earth? We weren't playing with Spaceships in 1969.
4
We will have humans living in space when every square inch of Antarctica is filled with 100-story skyscrapers, because Antarctica is much more inhabitable and conducive to human life than is outer space. Add to that the cost of accelerating every gram of material to a speed many times faster than any bullet or artillery shell ever fired.
I'm sure life in outer space will appeal to a population that doesn't even want to walk to the store for pizza, but wants it delivered to their house.
4
Because it is there... since before our ancestors even began walking out of Africa to populate the world, there has been this insatiable monkey curiosity of what lies on the other side of that next hill. Space is that hill... and as JFK said so many years ago -- it will be hard. And if we look at all the technologies who's existence is owed to the developments needed to put a man on the Moon, that is a challenge we need to embrace. Facing a challenge, IMHO, brings out our best -- and we will be changed by it. Just as our ancestors were changed by walking over that next hill. The stars are our destiny. And I am only sorry I will not live long enough to see us there.
7
Money for contractors, and to fulfill some buffs' science fiction fantasies.
A complete waste of money and technical talent.
9
@Jonathan Katz
Yeah, What a bust the internet turned out to be, right? Total waste.
2
@Rob
of course, the internet is not turning out so wonderful now is it? And there's lots more dirt coming down the pipeline too.
I'm with Reverend Abernathy--we need to secure the rights and dignity of millions of Americans right here on Earth before we go jauntily off into space as though just because we can, we should.
3
Plant billions of trees on earth.
10
So that Mr. Gorski can get lucky.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA7b98NTof8
By Allegra Huston, daughter of the eponymous director John.
1
@Padonna
That's a great story. If only it were true...
Because it's there.
3
If our ancestors were as lame as half of those commenting here, homo sapiens would have never left Africa.
15
Because, it’s there.
2
Yes, it makes little scientific or fiscal sense to send humans to the moon or Mars when robots can do a much better job at much lower risk. Yes, the drive to put people in space is often driven by conflicting, if not misguided, motives.
Yet ... there's something inspiring about putting humans like us in challenging situations and making heroes out of them and those that helped them succeed. That inspiration, as we have seen with Apollo, can motivate new problem solvers who will address all these other issues in the long term.
Investing in high-profile science and human endeavor has, and will continue to be, one of the best investments a government can make.
3
@Peter Christensen
uh, not a good investment. Not a good commercial.
I can offer three reasons. I'm not sure they're good ones, but here they are:
1. If we don't do it, someone else will.
2. It helps build an industrial and professional base for the next fifty years.
3. With the world increasingly dominated by dictatorships, the world needs to see a democracy take the lead.
16
@James Ribe: Which democracy would that be? This one isn’t much of one lately.
4
@James Ribe
three totally irrelevant reasons. We are trying to change that world of wars, political dominance, and the me-first mentality of science fiction.
1
Aside from the arts, our poetry, etc., it is a most noble endeavor. Last night as i was going to bed i looked out at the moon and i thought, we've been there. Maybe we are good for something besides continually fighting and arguing among ourselves, making too many babies, and spewing our garbage about, we are good for something. The thought of those foot prints up there, upon that beautiful moon gives me pride and joy. There's hope for us yet.
5
@Nightwood
whatever we do here, we will do there.
80 years ago eccentric sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein wrote a novella in which a private business invents space travel. Once the US space travel program started, Heinlein's fantasy seemed bizarrely wrong, but Heinlein was onto one thing: either a space program had to be economically self-sufficient ( as it was supposedly was in the story) or it will require endless infusions of cash. Shouldn't we determine whether space exploration is sustainable before we start committing money to it?
4
@Charlesbalpha
I think I've got a pretty good imagination, but I cannot imagine a scenario in which humans determine whether space exploration is sustainable WITHOUT committing some amount of money to it. This is not to say budgeting and planning are not needed. But in Goodbye, Columbus, Richard Benjamin said "I'm a liver, not a planner." I think that goes for the majority of humans. They will try their hand at bold ventures merely to find out whether they can succeed. Stifling that impulse is probably a worse mistake than giving it rational expression.
@Marcus Aurelius
Not sure what Marxism has to do with it. Heinlein was, if anything, rather right-wing.
@Chris Winter
Didn't they commit a lot of money to it in the 1960s? Several billion dollars, I think?
Fundamental laws of chemistry and physics lead, inexorably, to the conclusion that the energy cost of colonization or exploitation of natural resources on the moon or Mars will never be viable, from an economic perspective. To believe otherwise is an act of ignorance or of hubris.
But the lure of space is, at its heart, of other origins. It stimulates our curiosity, our imagination, our creativity, and our urge to be something more than we are. And, in the U.S., we desperately need this antidote to the current, toxic, politics of cynicism, capitalism, and divisiveness. Space exploration is an inspiring distraction, and a tonic for our fear of finiteness.
I would suggest that there are many ways to address these emotional and psychologic needs that are more productive, and less costly.
Our spacecraft, our "rovers", our terrestrial and space observatories have brought us astounding information about the cosmos. Let's expand the funding for these initiatives.
15
My young son, still largely unspoiled by this world, stares up at the sky with real wonder and curiosity. Whatever its origins, I cannot but help support the space program. Because it’s only human to want to know and explore. And it’s interesting and inspiring. There’s a reason millions of people around the world tuned in to watch in 2969. Ask any kid.
5
A very nice piece. As one who was in college when the moon landing occurred during the Vietnam war, I experienced that "greatest event since Creation" as primarily propaganda of the cold war. While it is very nice to see the plethora of nostalgia without the hyperbolic verbiage of manifest U.S. greatness and a nicer veneer of benefits to all humanity (just what I'm not sure though) applied, the visual programing and ink-spilled still hold those "claims" to 1960-76 colonial and imperial suzerainty for me. Can't we deal with this Earth first?
4
I remember the moon landings and how thrilled I was. But I don't feel as bad about our 50-year hiatus in human space exploration as I once did. Since 1969, our probes and landers have taught us incredible things about the planets of our solar system, out to Pluto and even beyond. The Hubble Telescope gave us a glorious eye on the universe. Every exoplanet ever discovered has been found since the 1990s--before that, we weren't sure if there were planets anywhere outside our own system. Now, we know of thousands of them. There are even plans afoot for scientists to send swarms of postage stamp-sized spacecraft to Alpha Centauri to take a look and report back.
The International Space Station is the beginning of a semipermanent human presence in earth orbit. With the discover of much-neede water within the moon's South Pole craters, the Chinese are planning a manned landing within the next few years. Other countries also have their own space programs, including India and the European Space Agency. Billionaires like Elon Musk are spending their own money on rockets and on efforts to reach Mars.
Our future in the solar system WILL happen (if we don't bake ourselves first), although not in the same way or on the same timetable that we envisioned half a century ago.
From a purely scientific perspective there is not a good reason to send humans to personally explore the universe. Unmanned space probes can pack more instrumentation per kilo than a space craft that contains the life support and comforts needed to accommodate human beings; not to mention the long durations needed to visit any planet within our Solar System. Unmanned space flight gives you more bang for your buck.
Speaking of bangs, there is also the consideration of safety. Accidents do happen when you strap people on top of millions of liters of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. When tragedy does occur, beyond the loss of human life, there is the inevitable down time when the engineers try to understand the cause of the accident to redesign and build safer space craft.
The Star Trek vision of a future where we explore the outer reaches of the galaxy, cannot, unfortunately be achieved without an effort that is impractical and unsustainable.
14
The U.S. needs to send humans back to the moon because soon enough the Chinese will go and annex it.
3
@globalnomad
No one can annex it. It belongs to all the people on Earth. Any one can go there.
1
@Jorge Uoxinton You're not getting me. They will claim it as theirs and militarize it. Furthermore the world will think of it as the final decline of the United States and the supremacy of China.
@globalnomad
so what? Why is it always about domination and politics and war? It's possible China will come to their senses politically once they see that "little blue dot" we all live on. Might happen!
The answer is simple. It's so humans have a place to live after Earth is uninhabitable by humans. Then mostly likely we'll ruin the new place.
2
@Fir How many 2, 3, 10, more?
This is a waste of our priorities which should be concentrated on earth science in light of the coming climate change disaster. All the moon is is a great political campaign grandstand.
30
The only reason to spend money on a research expedition to the moon or mars, when we haven't figured out the solution to global warming yet, would be if you're wondering what the earth might look like a hundred years from now.
4
Humanity needs to get beyond this planet. There are too many of us and those in power are more concerned with their quarterly returns, than with the quality of life for all of us who inhabit this “blue dot” as Carl Sagan described the Earth. All who have ever lived have been on this blue dot, that does not mean that all who ever live have to be here. To perpetuate Humankind we need to slip the surly bonds of Earth.
2
Please. Humans are humans. We'll take our same prejudices, fears, greed, and religions with us. Look at our history. On the other hand, we blew it here, and there are so many other planets available, why not find one without other living things, and then have a go at destroying that, too. We're good at it.
3
I don’t know how to answer this question except by asking: why to do anything? Why to create? Why to write books, study, look at the night sky, listen to music and paint pictures? If human beings are mere survival machines, there is no point in existence all all. We create meaning by transcending ourselves. So if you don’t understand the allure and grandeur of space exploration, if pure science has no value for you, if you don’t acquire knowledge for its own sake, I have nothing to talk to you about. We belong to different species.
71
@Mor Very well put.
4
@Mor
I defend with my life your right to indulge in fantasies of granduer and acquire all the knowledge you want, Just pay for it yourself and leave the taxes I pay on my hard-earned wages out it. I prefer they be used for things that will truly improve the lives of all people, all creatures for that matter.
And no I am not a neo-luddite my entire career and education has been centered in science.
6
Before humans can go beyond Earth orbit for any duration we need an infrastructure of robots ready and capable to support and assist in any and every situation that could arise, at any and every point in the journey.
You can't just shove little meat bags into pressurized capsules, shoot them off to Mars, and expect them to colonize it and declare human space travel open for business.
3
Nothing was really gained from our moon race with Russia. No moon base, no space travel buses to the moon, and no publicly available high-resolution moon photos (check out Google Moon-- vs Google Earth). It took a big portion of the money in America's piggy bank (10 years worth), and it will cost us another 10-20 years and trillions of dollars if we continue.
We should fix our home here on earth--it will easier and more of a possibility--more so than living on Mars.
11
Why go to Space? Very simple answer: Earth is finite and yet most Earthlings procreate and utilize non-renewable resources as if Earth is infinite. It’s all in the Math.
4
We the People have already spent billions on trips to the Moon and Mars. It’s time to spend our tax dollars to improve education, and make it free, along with health care for any one that needs it but can’t afford.
6
The appropriate place to spend precious money to help real people is our planet, Earth.
6
If only we felt the same awe and applied ingenuity to our own planet...what the outcome could be.
4
There are some sloppy mistakes in this essay. The Vikings no more discovered North America than Columbus did (or my father when he arrived here in 1972). And George Dufek was not the third person to reach the South Pole. There were five men in Amundsen's expedition and five more in Scott's. Dufek was the eleventh South Pole visitor.
1
Columbus never reached North America yet the Norse did. What is mistaken about that?
You can argue - and I am beginning to - that the United States of America as a thing was at its zenith when Neil Armstrong stepped foot onto the Moon, and that we've been in a slow, steady decline the past 50 years.
That being said, the reason we send men into space is the same reason the explorers traveled the seas, the Wright Brothers flew across Kitty Hawk, Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, Hillary and Norgay first climbed Everest, and all the other feats of exploration and technological advance over the millennia; because that is what we do as a species.
6
The desire to send people to space and inhabit other planets, especially for all the rich men who are investing in this, just looks like the same old story of conquering new territory to exploit and trash, while doing nothing to stop the devastation humans have done to their own planet.
Since earth is being destroyed, it's time for the richest to make sure they have a new place to go and exploit, learning nothing from our destructive actions.
5
The irony and the idiocy of a government that rejects science in every possible way, now insisting on new manned moon missions. Why? Not for scientific purposes, clearly. We have thrown climate science into the trash--as we're doing to the planet.
There is no other earth within reach of humanity. this is all we've got. At best a space colony would be like Strangelove's bunker community, selected and bred to narrowly preserve the species. It's a fantasy of eugenics and white suprematism.
This whole idea of manned space exploration makes sense only when seen as an advertising campaign attesting to the power of our nuclear arsenal, and 'brand' of American superiority. It's Trump 101; an expensive empty gesture made with a giant object. But instead of a wall it's phallus-shaped rocket.
5
Send unnamed robots and vehicles. Space has toxic radiation and, I believe, no air.
8
"Space beckons again. But why go?"
Because it's there?
4
@Ed
You're right. It is a silly reason isn't?
this ridiculous fantasy of humans colonizing mars or some other equally inhospitable planet is foolish when we have the most beautiful and hospitable planet known. Those billions wasted (IMO) on supporting human space exploration should be invested in the most critical problem that ever faced human kind (and all living things on earth): global warming. People should be utterly terrified. Earth is paradise, why in the universe would anyone trade it for life (if you could call it that on mars). Keep FICTION out of science.
35
"President Trump has said he wants to return Americans to the moon by 2024"
Trump is lying, as usual. I read that during his shutdown in January, NASA lost valuable engineers who weren't being paid. By the time the shutdown ended, they had been snapped up by the private sector and are probably aren't coming back. Meanwhile the Chinese had an unprecedented accomplishment, exploring the far side of the moon.
6
@Marcus Aurelius
He said he wanted Americans to return to the moon but sabotaged NASA. I'd say that was the sign of a lie, or what Orwell called doublethink.. No, my world isn't small -- why do you say that?
As humanity becomes more effective at destroying our planet, the only hope to save it, and ourselves, may lay in space. The promise of an endless solar energy supply, limitless mineral riches, and even an escape from Earth's eventual destruction should not be ignored. Plenty of people asked why anyone would want to cross the ocean to the Americas back in the day. Yet, hundreds, then thousands, then millions migrated anyway in search of a better life and a better future for all humankind. Are the would-be space settlers of today any different?
4
@Mr. Adams You could literally go to Home Depot this afternoon and find everything you need to build the same level of ship Columbus used to cross the Atlantic and, fingers crossed and Godspeed, you might even survive the trip. Going to Mars on taxpayers dollars is (with inevitable cost overruns) going to cost a chunk of America's GDP to pull off and the people who run around up there taking selfies are going to be the ultimate welfare recipients because the minute the supply chain were to be cut they would incapable of sustaining themselves there. If you really are curious what it would be like then Matt Damon in "The Martian" already did a more interesting version of it for a fraction of a percent of the cost of doing it for real. Let's make sure Flint, Michigan has taxpayer-funded clean water before Mars does at roughly $100,000 a gallon.
4
A big part of the reason the space program began to fall apart after the Apollo 11 moon mission were endless squabbles by the politicians over why the taxpayers were being forced to fund such an expensive undertaking. In July 1969 America finally beat the Soviets to the moon. So what?? Every subsequent space mission, including future flights to the moon, seemed anti-climatic. We had too many problems to solve on Earth to worry about the Moon. It's a real shame we lost our sense of adventure and wonder.
No bucks -- no Buck Rogers. Once the money was gone so was the space program.
4
@sharon5101
We don't need Buck Rogers. Or science fiction.
First, can we have a transportation to benefit the people of THIS nation. Or, let private industry and their shareholders pay the initial $10 billion and own a share.
4
Send H.A.L without humans. We don't need humans to go. Computers/robots can do a good job and it would be much cheaper. Maybe when we discover wormholes and we can zip around without worrying about radiation and long, isolated journeys in space.
Thank goodness for the Hubbell. To see those glorious pictures. We who have lived during this time, the first time really seeing space, it's been so amazing!
9
The answer to the question posed is simple: to ensure that humanity as a species survives, we have to get off the single mote of dust on which we currently reside exclusively.
6
@Someone “Someone” slept through General Relativity. We ain’t goin’ nowhere.
6
Anyone old enough to have been sentient during the Apollo age can surely remember the excitement, thrill and inspiration arising from it. Was there ever a more exciting and binding time in our lives as a nation?
But more than that, turning our backs on what has only recently been discovered defies the natural curiosity of our species. The search for exoplanets has struck gold at last, and the results are breathtaking. You may read of the discovery of at least "100 planets" orbiting other stars, but most astronomers have come to believe that every star has at least one planet. That means... billions of planets.
Given its resources, could our moon be a stepping stone to intragalactic exploration? Certainly, the laws of physics as we know them today make such notions sound preposterous, but now many scientific "certainties" have fallen by the wayside from Galileo to Hawking?
Mankind is too curious to turn inward from the incredibly populous sky we see every night. We will always want to know more, and in that "more" may lie answers to the incredibly bleak future we face, stuck in the gravity well of Mother Earth.
7
@CPMariner
OK, yadda yadda. But if we can't rescue Mother Earth, there's no point in "exploiting" every other planet in our way.
I was 19 when I watched the moonwalk. I was underwhelmed. Personally I think this planet has it all. But we sure have a lot of work cut out for us to get our house back in order. And I'm not interested in high-flying prose until She is restored.
Let the oligarchs spend their money since nobody is willing to tax it.
But the U.S. government surely has better things to spend resources on than repeating or slightly extending something that happened five decades ago.
Apollo proved the U.S. could target the moon, Red Square or anywhere else with a big missile. Robots have already been to Mars, and putting humans there doesn't advance science, knowledge or war planning.
17
Of course we've completely answered the question why.
First, we're killing off this planet in record pace and should have a bolt hole to improve our species chances of survival.
Second, when the first people went to the Americas the rest did not ask why they'd go there, they went each for their own reasons. Humanity isn't a single organism, most will never leave this planet, some will risk anything to.
Third, if a few have the desire and means to, the rest can have endless discussions about the why, those that want to discuss how and consider other questions immaterial.
I'm not leaving this planet, I'm getting old and going to another world is too dangerous for my taste. But I applaud those who would risk going to the new world and do what defines us most.
4
@Felix Drost I’m surprised that your comment and more than few others comments suggest that being as we’re trashing our planet let’s just get out of here and basically do the same thing somewhere else...why not suffer a lot to save our beautiful home and all living brings still on it???
4
Deliver us from the Luddites!
Space has solar energy in abundance and vacuum to spare. The possibilities for clean materials manufacture are boundless. This is not news, science writers were covering the topic 40 years ago.
4
@Dana “clean materials manufacture...” If you call an environment of deadly, hard radiation “clean.” You go first.
5
Send robots.
Robots and probes can travel for a long time and cover great distances. The information they send back is more valuable than a human could ever provide....and robots don’t have to return.
25
As Buckminster Fuller pointed out, we are already on a spaceship. It is the most beautiful, diverse, and fascinating place we've found in the universe. Of course, it's in serious need of repair, and it may completely fail, however, it's ours. Let's fix it, celebrate it, and let the robots fly off to the others.
117
Time is on the side of sending robots. They are vastly cheaper. They don't carry the huge emotional burden if they fail. They are becoming more capable every day.
When the technology becomes so advanced that sending humans carries far less risk than today and has real advantages beyond national pride and prestige, then it will be the time.
24
@John0123 There is only one way to develop technology, that is to explore. Test and retest to find out answers so as to ask more questions. Exploring with robots still needs testing and development.
3
@oscar jr. technology has not helped this planet, only the self interest of people. Look around and notice that as technology explodes, species go extinct, forests are cleared, chemicals pollute water and air aspeople demand more iPhones which require mined heavy metals. Technology is the death sentence to our planet to all species.
5
I find it amazing that with all of real problems we can solve on earth, our home, we focus on sending a few representatives on a dead-end mission to our neighboring spheres. While it is true that past explorers were faced with challenges many considered insurmountable, the analogy with space exploration is not equivalent for reasons we understand deeply, not that we imagine. Meanwhile, the massive challenge of climate change continues to be addressed only weakly, as supposed leaders turn their gaze skyward past our atmosphere and to a time millions of years in the future when earth is enveloped by the sun. I say space is for robots only especially when we ignore stewardship of the home we have.
50
Humanity must escape Earth to ensure the survival of the species. "To spread and multiple" is probably one of the core categorical imperatives of humanity.
3
@Mannyv
NUTS!
3
@Mannyv Really really understanding the distances involved will make your brain ache and so any grand vision of humans sweeping across the cosmos like some "colonize the Wild West" vision of the past should take into account that such a process would most likely involve frozen embryos being thawed and reared by robots after potentially hundreds of thousands of Earth years in flight in the cold dark void. I'm all for it but not with 2019 tax dollars and technology. Better take great care of this planet now with the resources we've got and realize that if there is even a sliver of reality to those dreams we could have hundreds of years of technological advances ahead of us before we are ready to try it and even then it make take even more millennia to actually achieve the results.
5
@Mannyv. Umm no! Humanity is killing the planet. The universe needs and deserves less people, not more.
5
Humans are eminently susceptible to the siren song of scaling; its limits seem counterintuitive. So, it is easy to believe that having sent men to the moon, it is a simple question of scaling up the effort required for the moon mission.
Yet it is an inescapable fact that there are strict limits to scaling up a project. For instance, a rope's ability to carry weight is proportional to its cross section; however, if a hanging rope is long enough for its own weight to tear it, increasing the girth of the rope will not increase its maximal hanging length before it breaks. Just imagine two ropes hanging side by side being long enough to tear under their own weight, joining them will not enable them to resist further lengthening.
4
We have enough problems requiring funding to survive on earth in an age of climate change. Manned exploration of space is inefficient compared to far less expensive pure robotics, which provided most of our spectacular discoveries of the last 50 years. (The main exception was the Challenger manned repair mission for the flawed but ROBOTIC Hubble Space Telescope.)
Yes, it might take manned missions to discover microbes on Mars. But so what? We already are likely to learn from local planetary robotic missions or from space-based telescopes (e.g. Kepler) whether planets in our or other solar systems can support life. But then again, so what?....we can never send humans beyond our solar system, given the time required of the individuals involved. So at best we will never meet "E.T.", only microbes in our own solar system.
And then here is the last refuge of the manned space flight advocates: colonize Mars in case the earth becomes TOTALLY uninhabitable. But, even given global climate change, that is unlikely to happen for millions of years, and by then our species likely will have destroyed itself by war or plague or else evolved (or devolved) beyond anything we would recognize today. This Mars fantasy as an alternate world for humans is simply humans' reluctance to accept mortality...in this case a mortality applying to the whole species.
That species will last longer if we focus more will and more resources on the earthly problems which REALLY threaten us.
69
@Marc Nicholson Well said! It is distressing to see manned space exploration adopted so fervently by otherwise intelligent people, especially as we effectively ignore the stewardship of our own planet. We see Star Trek communicators become reality in smart phones and then make the illogical leap that all the rest of the science fiction can become fact. My only comfort is in knowing that whatever resources end up going to manned space, it will amount to nothing of note.
23
Our best hope is subterranean. From there, we can figure out how to repair the earth.
1
Jerry Seinfeld captured the motivation pretty well as an example of "male thinking": "Hey guys, why don't we fly up to the moon and drive around?"
11
Its time to answer why? Why write about the human condition, why report on truth and justice? Why do we look up at the sky and wonder? Why do we dream of flying. Why do we even bother to strive for anything. Its our destiny. And its not time to wonder why, its time to get on it, to wonder why we even stopped or why we even paused. Or wonder why we don't have a moon colony, or why we don't have 50 space stations around the earth, and have 2hr intercontinental space ships instead of 12 - 18 hr airplanes. I wonder why, your wonder why.
14
The bigger question: why not send humans into space?
We owe it to science.
6
@Simon
"Science" would much rather have robotic probes up there right now doing real research and discovery. Sending humans at this point in the game is nothing but a circus stunt and an enormous cost burden which limits, not enhances, the actual amount of science getting done. It took us two million years of evolution before we were able to get to the moon. We can wait another couple hundred years if necessary to get out and about the solar system when there is a real purpose for people to do so.
5
Thank you Dennis for these encouraging words.
In a letter to the Times (Oct 16, 1988) I said, in effect, that humans, not just robots, need to go to space to, as you said "...dig and climb around there ourselves."
I hope we are getting closer!
Susan Switzer
1
We live in a very sad time where the value of pure research is not recognized.
92
@rbyteme
Research is important, but we spend far too much on research and not enough on things that we need such as health care, medicine and food for the poor/disabled, public transportation, alternative energy, environmental disasters, etc., etc., etc.
4
@Kara
What did the poor do to deserve all this free stuff? Share some genetic sequences?
3
@rbyteme
Exploration and scientific research can be done just as effectively and more easily and less expensively with robots.
The Mars Rover and the Hubble Telescope did more to advanced science than the Apollo program and Space Station did, at a fraction of the cost.
7
We need to open up territory on the Moon for human habitation AND LAND OWNERSHIP. If nobody can own the land nobody is going to go to space. The Far Side of the moon should be opened to claims made on land if people go there and build infrastructure on it.
@Jeff
I'm sure you've seen the far side of the moon. I wonder what the probability would be, of being struck by a meteorite within a lifetime, living on that side.
4
@Jeff
Oh, good grief. Nothing sillier.
2
There is no reason to spend many billions of dollars so a few people can live a miserable life on Mars. Mass hysteria is the only explanation for the support for this lunacy.
44
@Victor Troll
There is another reason and that is greed. There's huge money to be made.
We need to somehow make it common knowledge that there is also huge money to be made - and saved - saving the Earth from climate change and loss of bio-diversity. It is just different people who stand to make the Earth-focused bucks and the established players do not like that.
8
The robotic probes to the moon and planets are doing a great job. We do not need the expense and risk of manned missions.
57
"What's the point of being human, if you're not curious?"
John Dobson (of the Dobsonian telescope)
We live on a very small spacecraft, in a very large universe. Aren't you curious about what's out there?
Our spacecraft is the solar system, with the sun as its energy source. It's a weird craft, because we live on the OUTSIDE of it, exposed to the space elements, and they are harsh!
We aren't taking very good advantage of this humongous fission reactor (over a million times the volume of Earth). Only about 0.000000046% of the Sun's emitted energy strikes the Earth. The rest is lost in space.
19
Fusion.
1
@Raz you can be curious and still recognize that sending people to space it not cost effective (at all!)
9
@Raz A Hobbesian choice, no?
1
The last time we seem to have had a national purpose, national goal, was the Apollo program. We need another such unifying (E)nterprise.
2
@Richard Frauenglass Climate change offers enough reality that should unify (and terrify) everyone.
10
@A J Unfortunately lacks the I.Q. (imagination quotient) and a-political nature of space exploration to garner widespread support.
1
That was a beautifully written article
3
Haven't you been reading the news? Because billionaires want to.
3
Yes, we do need to build new spacecraft. NASA already has the Space Launch System ( SLS) and there planning to build a lunar gateway (https://zlios.com/logistics/lunar-gateway-transportation-operations/). SpaceX are already providing logistic operations to the Space Station. (https://zlios.com/logistics/space-logistics/). NASA new Orion capsule is just a stepping stone, a new people carrier. We need to build spacecraft in orbit that can travel to Mars and beyond and be totally reusable. We need to build the space equivalent of a containership that takes personnel and some supplies to and from Mars. Sending Science probes to the planets is great, but we need to send scientists and build bases. The costs of launching payloads into space are coming down due to new technology and competition. SpaceX , Virgin Galactic etc are all commercializing space travel in the same way as Airbus and Boeing build planes for airlines. Ion engines are in development and this will really aid deep space missions. NASA has done a great job, but there are plenty of other countries and companies, whom have massive space ambitions, there are no points for being second best.
1
@Mark Johnstone
Old mentality, that. "No points for being second"
Can we not recognize the folly of that kind of thinking?
Usually in this newspaper there is much concern about climate change expressed, and rightly so. How is it good for the planet to be sending rockets into space? I'd like to know how many airplane flights one moon mission is equivalent to.
11
But space exploration and sending rockets out of the atmosphere had led to us being able to understand climate change and monitor it via satellites.
Think of all the TV channels inspiring future scientists - using satellite tech. Think of people around the world who previously had no access to education who now can via online courses.
Plus there remains the possibility of mining Helium-3 on the moon, which could potentially lead to ‘clean’ nuclear fusion. If we were to have that, then we could very easily halt or reverse man-made climate change.
Yes, we need to stop climate change but Banning things that could help, is not a good idea.
7
@Roberta
Asteroid mining will certainly happen, if we don't destroy earth's civilization first. We're running out of resources, and as Neil DeGrasse Tyson pointed out, the asteroids are floating around out there (including quite a number of near-earth bodies), already neatly sorted out into carbon and metal categories. Imagine the pollution we can avoid if we're no longer digging around in earth's dirt or in old city dumps looking for metals.
3
@Eliot Attridge
I'm afraid all of this is wishful thinking.
1
Robot explorers, with modern computers and AI, can perform high-level science at a fraction of the cost of human exploration. Sending humans into space -- burdened by the costly logistics of providing food, water, oxygen and waste disposal -- is a stupid waste of money that will delay rather than advance knowledge. The idea of colonizing Mars -- the bootstrap often used to justify restarting a human space program -- is errant nonsense. Humans and the things they eat have evolved on a planet with an atmosphere, ample water, and a 24-hour-day 365-days-per-year cycle. Mars offers none of that. Moreover, even if the Earth-origin living things could somehow adapt to the alien Martian environment, they would be bombarded constantly by deadly radiation (because there's no shielding atmosphere) that would kill them in short order.
3
"Why send humans into space?"
This question was asked of Sam, on the president's staff in "West Wing." His perfect answer:
"Because it's next."
2
Silly headline.
3
This discussion about the merits of space travel and travel to the moon in particular reminds me of the discussion about the value of the Wright's first flight in 1903. Nobody in the US government saw any value in an airplane and it wasn't until France feted the Wrights like heroes that the US government took notice.
Do you think anyone in the early 1900's could envision what we have today? Millions of people flying on a weekly basis and being able to reach any major city on earth within 20 hours.
Or how about the fact that rockets built by entrepreneurs using technology developed by the Apollo program perform better and cost less than anything NASA is doing. Technology is rapidly bringing down the cost of space flight to the point it that every day excursions and working in space will be common place.
The problem is most everyone has only a short horizon, say 5 - 10 years, and can't see the potential benefits that might accrue 20 - 30 years out from a a large R&D project related to space travel.
I say let's spend the money for going to the moon again.
9
@C.G.
I do not want my money spent on anything but cleaning up the Earth.
6
Actually, it would be interesting to examine why or whether the invention of the airplane was a good thing. It is an invention which has caused incalculable death and destruction in warfare, and only in the past few weeks the Times has had a couple of articles describing the environmental damage done by air travel. And this environmental damage done by the flights themselves because of the carbon pollution probably pales relative to the destruction done by the hordes of tourists who descend on some innocent, wonderful, unspoiled place, and then wreak environmental havoc. Another interesting idea, not to be discussed by me here, is whether the interstate highway system was a good idea. (Certainly contributed to ruining a lot of great places and to destroying the livelihoods of a lot of people, among other things, as well as driving up carbon use exponentially).
4
Trying to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024 will result in many dead astronauts. The timeframe is wildly unrealistic. Trump will soon realize that he cannot frighten, demote or fire enough people at NASA to make it happen, and hopefully he will resume his twitter rants about going to Mars instead. That will mercifully relegate this topic to the back burner until long after his presidency has ended.
We should engage in solar system exploration with robots, not humans. Robots are safer and more cost effective.
But JFK understood the emotional pull of putting humans in space. If we want government funding, we need public support. So humans in spaceships will always be a necessary part of the equation for space exploration, whether we like it or not. And private enterprise wants humans in space, too.
So be safe, everyone.
As best you can.
4
@Blue Moon exactly: its PR, pure and simple (but still wasteful).
3
It's always baffling to me that this question even needs to be asked. In the long run, if humanity does not go into space, then our species will eventually vanish from the universe having left no mark and having done nothing of importance. Having all of humanity on this one vulnerable planet is risking extinction, and if we go extinct now, we will do so without ever having met any intelligent space-faring species, or having accomplished anything noticeable.
In space, resources are nearly limitless, and there's endless room to grow. On Earth, our population is already nearing the maximum sustainable amount. We'll probably never be able to move our entire population off the planet, but until we get a self-sustaining colony in another star system, we will be at great risk of instant extinction, by massive asteroid strike or other factors.
So the answer to why should we go into space is, we need to if we want to continue existing. If we want humanity to die right here and never amount to anything, then we shouldn't go into space.
13
I agree, except that I also believe we have passed the point where we can successfully inhabit anything but the Earth before this planet is no longer habitable. It's too little too late.
6
@Dan Stackhouse
I agree with you, but the moon and Mars will not serve as lifeboats. We need to solve our problems here on earth, or we will just wind up porting them out into space with us. Still, that doesn't mean we shouldn't work now, in earnest, to get there.
Private companies, like Blue Origin and SpaceX, will be major players in future human spaceflight. I wonder if governments will be able to keep up.
8
Robots before humans.
The best way to save our planet is to allow everyone to live lives enabled by abundant, eco-friendly electricity (focusing exclusively on conservation only puts us at each others' throats, claiming "our" lifestyle is a more legitimate than "their" lifestyle).
That means abundant, cheap power storage of renewable energy and/or vast solar collectors in orbit beaming energy back down to the surface.
Both of those would be a lot easier if we mined asteroids for resources.
Robots before humans.
4
Why go?
Ultimately, to determine the answer to a very fundamental question who answer dictates what our long-term response to our existence must be:
QUESTION: Can humans survive long-term in deep space?
If the answer is "Yes", then:
Ultimately, the our biosphere will be incapable of supporting us so we will need to transport as much of us and our biosphere to a new home.
If the answer is "No", then:
Our species is consigned to spend its entire existence on Earth and we must do what we can to maximize the probability of survival of our biosphere for as long as we can.
It's just that simple.
7
@VJR
Well, we already know the answer is "No" with present technology!
2
Sending humans back to the Moon or to Mars is a big mistake. Robots and artificial intelligence can come close to doing what humans can do, and in some circumstances do even more. Sending humans not only increases the risk of failure (and deaths), but greatly increases the cost the mission, whatever that may be. Just as an example, with no humans on board, a fuel efficient path that takes much longer is possible.
If the purpose is scientific, robots should be used. If the purpose is political, then it isn't worth the extra cost and risk to send humans so that we can crow "see what we did!"
Colonizing other worlds is a fantasy - let that one go.
65
If colonizing other worlds is actually a fantasy, then humanity will never amount to anything, or last very long. Pretty bleak outlook.
5
@Dan Stackhouse
Maybe humanity already has amounted only to short-sighted foolish species which prefers to wipe out other species as well as itself.
10
@umbler It does not gladden my heart to know our bodies slowly evolved to meet the standards of living on this planet, and only this one, but that is the harsh truth. Still, what is it about the heavens that make our minds soar? IN our imaginations we can do crazy. wonderful things. Sometimes i feel as if our minds evolved just to tease us. After all, apes and monkeys do just fine in keeping their species going.
8
That July day in 1969 is one of my first memories. A wise neighbor called us in from play and made us sit in front of the television in his living room, the one and only time that happened. He must have known we couldn't fully appreciate it at the time, but that it might be a treasured memory. Nothing since has matched the inspirational power of Apollo. In the aftermath, we all wanted to be astronauts, as our mothers bought NASA-inspired food and lunar-themed fabric for our rooms. We thought our country could do anything; how could it not? It is still staggering to think about, all these years later, that we flew to the moon and back, and nothing since comes close.
31
We should send human to space because, as remote as it seems, planet earth will not exist forever, and finding other planets that will support the human race is a very long process. Better start now and have the option to find another home planet before it is too late.
5
@lieberma Why limit ourselves to finding planets that we can live on? Most of the Universe is empty space, matter is the exception, not the rule. Intelligence, mind, not the body is what is important, and intelligence can adapt its environment to suit its needs.
Humanity as we know it will probably not survive, but intelligence can survive. But only if it can escape the cradle that is Earth.
The only question is really "when can we afford it?" (Or "how fast should we work on this?")
But the question about whether to do it or not is problematic, sort of like asking "should humans have children?"
The answer is not figured out by counting or finding reasons based on what is going on now. These are existential questions, beyond everyday language to express. Just do it -- but do it carefully and well.
1
The current administration's statements about returning to the moon or going to Mars seem to be more like hollow remarks made for the news cycle and faux expressions of America first-ness. Should we depart this planet to live elsewhere in this galaxy? We haven't really been great stewards of the planet we already have. Do we really want to unleash our species on other worlds?
That said, if I had the chance, you can fly me to the moon.
1
I'd just like to know if anyone else remembers the Apollo 11 lunar module cardboard models that Bond's ice cream stores were giving out (in NJ at least)? And if anyone still has one? My friends and I collected so many, I must have put away a couple, but who knows where they are.
1
Skeptics worry that we don’t have the technology to other solar systems, and right now we don’t. However, we recently introduced re-launchable rockets the next step is to create refueling systems on other planets or satellites to allow for longer journeys.
With the investment into space technology we will be able to develop things that allow us to have more efficient systems that will get us farther from our cradle. But first we must test out our abilities through creating stations at places likes Mars.
The only thing way to progress is to try and space is vast and exciting, but we understand the equations that describe its behavior, and we understand ourselves enough to know we can’t stay here forever.
1
I'm a 'boomer', have been a devotee of space exploration since I was a kid, stared at my TV screen with disbelieving eyes while Armstrong took that 'small step'--but the spaceship I'm most concerned with now is Spaceship Earth. Until we fix this our only 'spaceship', it's pointless to worry about the moon, Mars, or anywhere else.
128
@Cody McCall
Rational commenters like Cody, Michael, Marc, et al are spot on. They and the rest of us that see the thrill, the challenge, the uplift of saving this our own planet must do more than make intelligent comment. We really must stop this huge distraction now and devote 100% of our creativity to saving Earth.
8
@operadog 'Saving' the Earth means to stop using resources. Finding ways to stop humans from consuming food. Finding ways to stop humans from reproducing. Lowering the population of the planet to less than one billion.
And that does nothing to mitigate the danger of a rock from somewhere 'out there' hitting the Earth and destroying all life.
This 'huge distraction' costs a fraction of what is spent on cosmetics in the United States today. More was spent on the war in Iraq than has been spent on space exploration since the beginning.
7
I recall discussing the Pluto New Horizons probe with a friend and its goals that were fairly impressive. My friend was a bit surprised when I told him it was a flyby and not be able to orbit Pluto. The rocket equation is unforgiving. A single probe that needed a gravity momentum boost to shorten the flight time in reaching the outermost “planet” from 15 years to 10. And New Horizons could certainly not carry people along…
The nearest star is 7000 times farther away.
Chemical rockets are never going to push humanity into deep space and future thoughts of space travel being simple enough for commercialization are unrealistic. Space is too harsh.
The fundamentals of space travel have not changed much in the last 50 years. The rockets are essentially the same—chemical rockets with the same chemicals. The new landing vehicle is the essentially the same. Changes have truly been minor.
Until some type of fusion power that is easily packaged onto a ship and can generate hundreds of years of power to stave off the entropy of going into deep space, humans will be stuck on this planet. The prospect of such is really remote for us and any alien species that may be out there. As stated in the article: “….the laws of physics are beyond our control, “ and they will likely keep us as a species on earth forever.
Space travel is worthy of spending the money to explore. The limits of space travel are based on science whereas too many see science fiction as the basis.
33
And don’t forget the awful radiation in space that our precious atmosphere protects us from. Prolonged exposure by humans traveling to distant bodies will surely suffer. Maybe man will be able to solve this problem also but I’m, reluctantly, pessimistic.
11
Why send humans into space? To expand human experience. We may not be the ones in the ship, but, we can empathize. And that's the reason why "Earthrise" is the most famous photograph of the 20th century.
2
@Chicago Guy I think the picture of that brave young man standing in front of that column of Communist Party tanks is equally memorable. Hopefully, one day, that picture will appear on the currency of China, replacing that of the world's #1 butcher, Chairman Mao. The picture of Earth from space cab be easily replaced by future travelers.
"Tank Man" captures a unique moment in the struggle for human liberty. (What did those criminals do to that "Unknown Hero")
2