The total cost of Curiosity to date is well under 5% of the cost of the recent trip humans took around the moon (something like $3B vs. $90B, or $20 vs. $600 per US taxpayer). Imagine the amount of science that could get done if we gave even half the budget of crewed spaceflight to rover / probe style exploration.
The unreasonably high price is because NASA is obligated by Congress to use Boeing and their SLS. It costs orders of magnitude greater than SpaceX for no benefit whatsoever, as a Falcon Heavy could absolutely be fitted for a lunar flyby if desired. Another problem is that rovers are way more limited than most people realize.<p>The fundamental problem is that moving parts break, so their design/behavior are very limited. For instance Curiosity's drill can only drill to about 6cm, and even then it broke after 16 limited activations. It then took a team of scientists around 2 years to come up with a partially effective workaround. A guy on the scene could have fixed it a few minutes, or done just as effective 'drilling' himself with a spoon. We're literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer.<p>Another issue is in mobility. That involves lots of moving parts. So Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h) meaning at its average speed it'd take about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area. So you want human feedback on a ~40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. And as might be expected its tires have also broken. So it's contemporary travel time would be even worse.<p>Imagine trying to dig into all the secrets of Earth by traveling around at 1 mile per year, and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm. And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future.
Presumably a common argument for sending a trained human expert in place of a robot is because a human can exercise much better judgment on what to explore and dive deep into on site, whereas doing so via a rover is subject to high latency and low bandwidth. It’d be really cool if LLM (or any AI for that matter) reaches the level of sophistication of an in the field scientist and we can send them instead of humans for 80% of the results at 10% of the cost.
The space program is not about science. It has never been about science. Science is just the excuse, the window-dressing. What it's really about is military power and sending money to the right congressional districts. Source: I worked at JPL from 1988 to 2004.
Yes, and Curiosity weighs 899kg, whereas a single SLS launch can put 26,988kg of robots, cargo, and humans into trans-lunar orbit.
Now that JPL has a design, they could crank out dozens of Curiosities and do lots of science with little more money.
> Curiosity [...] has traveled nearly 37 kilometers, drilled into and sampled 42 different rocks, and as of publication has snapped nearly 763,000 photos.<p>Without in any way minimising the amazing scientific and engineering achievements of the team and the rover: we need crewed space exploration because people on Mars would be able to do the above in significantly less than thirteen years. Or, to put it another way, would do much more science in the same amount of time.
> much more science in the same amount of time.<p>I'm not convinced by the time argument, as astronauts would have limited time on Mars dictated by orbital mechanics and return schedules, but the bigger problem is cost. You are replying to a comment about how rovers and probes are cost effective; there is no way that crewed exploration could accomplish more science than Mars rovers without orders of magnitude more cost.
A manned mission to Mars isn't even on the table yet (sorry, Elon) until we solve several huge problems, including cosmic radiation, landing heavy payloads, and a feasible alternative to chemical propulsion (most likely nuclear, but untested).
Add to the list that martian dust contains a massive amount of carcinogens meaning any air/dust lock has to be an ISO-6 clean room.<p>Sure it is a "solved" problem but all the solutions are very heavy.
Manned mission to Mars is a fad.<p>But it is important fad just like space mining.<p>We as humanity have to believe we are not in zero sum game to stay decent…<p>Unfortunately last years are showing us how ugly it is with rare earth elements, energy etc. It is also showing what you wrote is true. No one really believes that we can affordably space mine for rare earth and no one believes in Martian colonization that would bring tangible benefits.
If you held the same logic back towards the beginning of humanity then we'd all still be wandering about the woods poking each other with sticks. Most people don't believe things are possible which is probably some sort of evolutionary thing. A society full of people with their head in the clouds probably wouldn't work so great, but humanity would also stagnate without at least some people looking to the stars.<p>This could very well be why planned economies seem to struggle with innovation. People being able to devote significant resources to endeavors, that might not make sense to most, is how you get lots of failures, and the occasional revolutionary successes. Do everything by committee and all you get is a shinier version of what you had last year.
It wasn't that long ago that HN had a spirited discussion about how data centers in orbit could not possibly work. But it looks more and more like Musk is going to deliver.
>No one really believes that we can affordably...<p>People said that about everything. I wore a $10 silk tie to work today and ate toast with a $1 Avacado on it.<p>Marco Polo would shit a brick if he saw Interstate 90.
Not to mention supplying astronauts with food and managing their waste for 6+ months.
And if we're keeping costs proportional, send orders of magnitude more rovers and that helps the time argument for rovers as well.
A geologist with a shovel could do 10 years of Curiosity’s science in an hour.
For the cost of sending one human there for a week, we could send thousands of robots there for years.<p>There is no way that human space exploration is <i>ever</i> cost effective with robot space exploration.
Manned missions would still have constraints. In some cases, they would be far greater (e.g. due to the necessity of keeping the astronauts alive). Where there are fewer constraints, it would be intertwined with the cost of sending people to Mars. They may be able to travel faster, but a lot of that is going to be because of a larger energy budget. It is doubtful they could travel further, since there are still going to be limits on how far they could travel (humans need infrastructure). That said, perhaps they could cover a larger area (within a smaller radius) than robots. Risk is also a limiting factor, and it is a far bigger one with people. Humans may be more flexible, but you aren't going to have those romantic scenes of people scaling down steep slopes or spelunking in caves. It could be done, but the chances of something going wrong will inhibit it.<p>While on the topic of human flexibility, it is important to understand that it will be limited due to the resources available. What we saw on Apollo 13 wasn't the product of people trying to expand beyond the mission objectives with what is on hand, it was a last ditch effort to save the Apollo crew. They could afford to do unintended things with the equipment on hand since the only other option was to admit defeat then let people die. Even the very much fictional The Martian was based upon that premise. Treating it as a thought experiment: the primary response was to terminate the mission and evacuate. The part about the lone survivor on Mars was about ditching every mission objective in the name of survival. It would be very difficult to even create a fictional narrative of a human team going beyond the abilities of a similarly appointed robotic mission without abandoning reality altogether.
Can we realistically send humans to Mars plus the return trip? I would maybe believe we can do a one way trip and leave those astronauts to die after snapping some pictures.
I’m no expert of course but I get the impression that we’re trying to run before we can walk. Many more robotic missions and way more basic research done more scientifically first could quite plausibly get humans there quicker in the end. Reading A City on Mars I found myself thinking this is many orders of magnitude more complicated than Apollo and will take more time.
sending a human there also contaminates the planet more, allowing us to learn less.
Maybe we would get a microphone on mars.
Just kidding i know air pressure is vastly different, but still it would be cool to listen to ambient sound from there
Mars 2020 has a microphone. You can probably find audio out there but here’s some:<p><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/sounds-of-mars/" rel="nofollow">https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/soun...</a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHenFGnixzU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHenFGnixzU</a>
...and further imagine the science that could be done if we mass manufactured probes rather than using experimental engineering for each one. We could have had dozens of Voyager probes in the outer reaches of our solar system by now.<p>I would have loved to see more Huygens probes dropped to the surface of Titan or more New Horizons zoom past Pluto.<p>I don't think human spaceflight is to blame, rather it's what connects taxpayers to space exploration as an inspirational <i>human</i> pursuit. But, I do agree that can be more efficient with how we spend those dollars all around.
Much easier to get a moon mission due to politics .
The goal is colonization and industrialization of the moon and mars and some asteroids.<p>There is only so much interest in the surface geology of the other bodies in the solar system.
Suddenly HN is very pro automating human jobs with machines because it's cheaper
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