Human Spaceflight: No Single Rationale Justifies it, NRC Report

[Thyunda]

There are a million and one reasons for human spaceflight and exploration. Some of them are long-term, practical ones. Others would do wonders for psychological and medical research in the short term. Space exploration involves a whole lot of scenarios that you simply cannot simulate on Earth, and that would open up so many opportunities for studying the reactions of the human body against forces we've yet to really understand. Alongside those are the obvious philosophical answers, and even monitoring the growth of a new, human colony would tell us volumes about the culture and expansion of our species.

Really, the only disadvantage to space exploration is the cost, and since nobody complains about the huge amount of American dollars going into military development, I don't see how they can complain about this.

 

[Tradjus]

This is why corporations will own a majority of the solar system by the time we're all about too die.
It's the same thing that happened on every great expansion on Earth. A government or governments would get the idea in their heads too explore and colonize some vast distant land, then over time they'd sort of give up and say "Meh, hand the reins on this over too private enterprise."

 

[Something Amyss]

We don't need a single, unified reason.

Maybe this has been addressed on page 2, but....

Point of Pedantry: What sane person was going to tell Columbus not to go West?

People who were good at math. If there hadn't been land in his way, he would have been screeeeeewed. Columbus would have failed one way or the other, and this is why he was turned down by multiple nations before he got funding.

All the people that still believed that the world was flat and that he'd be sailing off to his doom? Indeed he did want to find a shortcut to India, but everyone thought he was nuts.

For a different reason. That the Earth was round was well established and would be known to his patrons. In fact, we knew the rough size of the Earth. Columbus, however, didn't seem to. He thought the trip would be significantly shorter and therefore his calculations said he could make it to India/East Asia. Hell, he continued to assert he had hit Asia into later life, possibly to his death. Meanwhile, his crew was about ready to mutiny when they hit the Americas.

 

[DrOswald]

[...]saying that there's no reason to explore space would be like telling Columbus there's no reason to sail west[...]

Point of Pedantry: What sane person was going to tell Columbus not to go West?

All the people that still believed that the world was flat and that he'd be sailing off to his doom? Indeed he did want to find a shortcut to India, but everyone thought he was nuts.

Common misconception: By that point everyone knew the Earth was a globe. In fact, we had know the earth was round since around 300 BC. We even knew the size of the globe. Which is why everyone thought Columbus was nuts. He was bad at math, had done the calculations wrong, and refused to be corrected. Getting to India by going the other way around was ludicrous because it would involve sailing a known distance that was impossible at the time due to technological constraints. Columbus, for no good reason, thought everyone was overshooting the size of the Earth and therefore thought it would be easy to sail around (he was dead wrong.)

Because of his incompetence he attempted something incredibly stupid and failed miserably, which he refused to acknowledge even with his dying breath. He didn't even get halfway to India. By sheer luck he ran into the Americas before he and his crew died of thirst or starvation.

The only reason Columbus ever got funding was because the Spanish took a gamble that the mad man's errand would pay off.

Columbus wasn't a great explorer. He was a lucky idiot. I hardly think we should use him as a role model for exploration.

 

[shirkbot]

We don't need a single, unified reason.

Maybe this has been addressed on page 2, but....

Point of Pedantry: What sane person was going to tell Columbus not to go West?

People who were good at math. If there hadn't been land in his way, he would have been screeeeeewed. Columbus would have failed one way or the other, and this is why he was turned down by multiple nations before he got funding.

You know full well that those people weren't/aren't sane! Mathematicians, bah!

But yeah, it's been addressed by myself and others that Columbus was a bit of an idiot and that it was commonly accepted that the world was round.

 

[DrOswald]

You do realize the prospect for long term colonization on other bodies is slim to none right?

I mean do you know the host of ways the human body starts failing once it leaves the earth's shell? Our bodies were designed from the ground up to work in this environment. Think I'm talking bull. consider this. and I've always said this. Before you colonize a planet colonize the bottom of the sea. You'd have to deal with many of the same problems, minus the issues caused by gravitational differences causing things like 'weakened immune systems' , 'Space diabetes', Spinal dislocation' 'bone thinning', the list goes on.

And that list will never get shorter unless we actively try to colonize other planets. There's a goal and challenges blocking us from achieving said goal; we'll overcome those challenges before achieved the goal - most likely with technological advancements or innovations created by [i/]studying[/i] the challenges. That's how it works. And at that point we don't even need to colonize planets: we could just build space stations big enough to house nations.

You have no concept of what that means do you? Let me put it this way. We can't even keep cruise ships from becoming cesspools of infection and vomit.

Yes, because Cruise Ships are the absolute height of human achievement, technology, and sustainable permanent habitat efforts. They are certainly not cut rate hotels built into a boat with absolute minimal standards of cleanliness and emergency preparedness.

In other words:
Step 1: Study and overcome physical and environmental challenges.

Study requires a century or more of research and the ability to actually have bodies to study. In case you haven't noticed.. when things go bad in space travel.. bodies are pretty much at best charred remains.

Ok, I am just confused at the first statement. Where are you getting this figure of a century of study? Are you assuming all scientific endeavors require 100+ years?

And the second part, when things explode you get charred remains. When other things go wrong, when the environment is bad, you get bodies that will be excellently preserved for years while you take your time retrieving them.

Step 2: Develop habitats that mimic Earth's environment, are self-sustaining, and provide for growth.

How much growth? also you're forgetting the biiiig one. Gravity. It's the difference in gravity that screws with us and unless science finds some magical way of altering the gravity of an object without also altering it's mass. Not gonna happen. Trust me that's something they're working on anyway, since that would have a pretty big effect on life without space travel.

Even if we can't create artificial gravity we don't actually need to. all we need to do is create a gravity like force. This can be achieved by rotation. The only significant barrier at this moment is that the space station would need to be very large. This is a problem right now because of materials cost but should not be in the future because of asteroid mining.

As for the other things, we can already sufficiently mimic Earth and solar power and asteroid mining can take care of sustainability. Growth is easy: make another space habitat. There is a lot of room in the void of space.

Step 3: Grow by colonizing celestial bodies or expanding said habitats(like a city building a suburb).

It takes light a 3 year trip to make it to the nearest star. Said star has no inhabitable planets either , you have to go at least 10 LY to find something that looks like it may be potentially habitable. Here's an idea. Sign up with the navy and spend 6 months on a nuclear sub. Just spend 3 months living and working on one. Add, higher stress levels, more cramped living space along with space diabetes and hopped up super bacteria and you've just experienced space travel and colonization.

Colonizing the actual celestial bodies is actually completely unnecessary and probably a bad idea. Once we can make sustainable earth like space habitats why would we ever need to go down to a planet? Any system with an asteroid belt is easily habitable and asteroid belts are thought to be extremely common.

OT: "There's no single rationale" is the stupidest excuse I've ever heard. So we should stop doing something because everyone has their own reason to do it? If we used that philosophy for everything we'd never get anything done.

Yup...and the people who see differently are the ones calling the shot. Perhaps they may be seeing something you can't. Like that it boils down to. Spend lives, and billions in resources to chase what could be a dead end. or devote those resources to developing things here to the point where we can plod along comfortably for another ten thousand or so years.

What they are seeing is that they are elected based on short term results. "This investment will pay off in 50 years!" is an easy way to ensure you don't get reelected.

After all. if we can't create self sustainability *here* we have no chance of doing it out there. So as I have said. FOrget space travel let's work on stuff down here first then once we've figured out how to colonize the ocean floor then we can talk about colonizing another planet. Same problems but much easier to to do the 'fail-increment-fail' cycle, and faster. It'll take us about a hundred years if we all put our heads to it... or more.

Colonizing the ocean floor would be way harder than creating a viable space station habitat. It is far easier to deal with the harsh environment of space than the harsh environment of the ocean depths. The biggest barrier we have right now to a viable space habitat is the cost of getting anything we build up to space. Material cost will become much less of an issue once we figure out asteroid mining. In fact, sustainability will be much easier in space because it will be a much more controlled situation. For example, we don't have to worry about pollution because we can just vent it into space.

There are significant barriers but not nearly as significant as you seem to think.

 

[Vareoth]

Scientific advances and basic curiosity are the only reasons I need. Knowledge outweighs all other factors and I will dread the day when economic reasons dictate ALL our actions.

 

[Racecarlock]

So people might die? Why do anything then? Ever? Also, the government funds wars that take hundreds of lives every day. The difference between war and space travel is with space travel you'd actually be accomplishing something.

People explore the arctic and antarctic knowing they might freeze to death. Hell, we have scientists that spelunk into fucking volcanos. Shit, people will jump out a plane with nothing but a bunch of intricately arranged silk being their safety net just for pure stupid thrills.

People died in the apollo program too. Didn't stop us back then.

As for world hunger, we're never going to solve that because there will never be enough food to feed literally everyone. Yeah, trying is nice. But let's leave that to charities, shall we?

To explore strange, new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.

When did that become "Ah fuck it, too risky, I'd rather stay home and watch bullshit TV."?

 

[DrOswald]

snip

The hundred years thing is actually a known time period when studying the full effects of something on the human body. See you need to study at least 5 generations that are subjected to the circumstances. The first generation will always skew the results since they are the first. but each successive generation yields more and more data and trends. I mean it can take as long as 40 years in a single individual to manifest cancer or other such conditions. Heck I've known people who've been smoking longer than I've been alive who still haven't shown it but they likely will.

Can you give me a source on this? I am unable to find this anywhere, but perhaps I am looking in the wrong place. But in any case, perhaps we need a century to fully understand all the nuances of the effect but we don't need to understand everything perfectly to create a workable model. We have fairly easily overcome the problems of permanent settlement in environments far more extreme than an earth like space habitat.

When anb environmental habitat goes bad on mars.. you do realize it will take some time to plan and organize a recovery mission right. Not to mention the actual mission and by that time you've lost considerable ground on figuring what happened.

Who ever said anything about a habitat on Mars? I specifically said colonizing other planets would be a bad idea. We start with earth orbiting habitats. Relatively easy to access if something went wrong. Why would we move outside of our own orbit until we have figured out space station habitats?

Sci-Fi paints lovely pictures but I've said it before... if want to know what it'd be like living on a space station... sign on with a nuclear submarine for a year and enjoy the ever cramped claustrophobic environments.

That is what a current space station is like. By necessity a permanent habitat would have to be very large just to effectively rotate to create the gravity like force. There is no reason to create a cramped environment when it already needs to be very large.

The only reason space stations are so cramped right now is because they are constructed on earth and getting the space station up there is incredibly costly. The high material cost necessitates small scale projects. Once we over come the high material cost there is no reason building massive space stations would be any sort of problem. And that high material cost will be overcome, but more on that later.

As for cruise ships. The reason I used cruise ships is because they actually are not unlike floating towns. and they can spend weeks to months at a time out... so here's the thing. Many of the problems come with the simple fact that when you have large numbers of people in such situations the logistics and realities begin to scale in ways you can't imagine.

Once again, this is assuming extremely small space habitats. A cruise ship is only like a space station if you design the space station that way.

And like I pointed out in the first place, cruse ships were not designed for permanent habitation. 4 months does not count as permanent habitation. The problem with cruse ships arise from the fact that they are not permanent habitations, nor are they especially well designed.

Just the spread of disease alone would be a taske and worse you'd be surprised what low-micro gravity does to microbes. It bloody super charges fungi, bacteria and viruses. They get stronger and deadlier. While at the same time our immune system actually gets weaker and more than a few drugs actually become less effective in low-micro gravity.

Just one of the reasons why we need the gravity like force! We already have a solution for this problem. This isn't going to be a micro gravity situation. That is not a problem.

As for the spread of disease, it will be no worse than the spread of disease in any city or, as a worst case scenario, aboard an aircraft carrier. And the military seems to have that one under control pretty well.

As for asteroid mining. Yeah we can't even get people to mars and back in safe fashion let alone the asteroid belt.

If your biggest reason we can't mine asteroids is because we can't get people to the asteroids you clearly don't understand asteroid mining. We don't need to get people to the asteroids. No one ever suggested doing that, it is a stupid plan. We bring the asteroids to us. The current model is to send a tiny drone to the asteroid belt that identifies useful asteroids. We then send another drone that attaches high efficiency rockets to those asteroids which slowly accelerate them towards Earth orbit. The second drone also identifies more useful asteroids for the second wave.

After a start up period we have a steady stream of materials heading towards earth ready to be processed in orbit into whatever we need, from oxygen to water to fuel to metal for building a larger space station. Humans never even have to leave earth orbit for this to work. The cost is estimated to be extremely low, significantly lower than obtaining the materials though traditional mining. In the future it will probably be cheaper to get iron from space than from the ground.

I don't mean to be rude, but you are thinking of space colonization all wrong. You are thinking of building habitats on Mars and sending people to the asteroid belt and finding habitable planets. You then list all the reasons those things would be hard. You never stop to think why those things are hard, solutions to those problems, and most importantly if we even need to do those things at all. You are focused on the problems, not the solutions.

 

[Draconalis]

Eventually the planet is going to die...

Does the continued existences of the human race not count as a good rational?

If people think a few years to a decade is plenty of time then I wouldn't count on them reacting -now- given the planet will remain habitable for millions or perhaps billions of years. Of course given all the cosmic events that could kill the entire planet near instantly at random...

Not that they'd act on it anyway.

The next ice age in about 10,000 years...

And Ice ages are pretty catastrophic.

 

[FalloutJack]

Ah, well. The thing of it is that eventually that which we can learn and so and know in our tiny corner of the galaxy will run out. Without something new, humanity will stagnate, period. May as well hit the ground running.

 

[Therumancer]

The survival of humanity is the biggest reason for it. Not to mention that the solution to a good amount of our problems here one earth, are located up there. To be honest space travel isn't going to solve the overpopulation problem as the overpopulation problem is what's causing the problems with funding spaceflight to begin with. Too many people, too many social problems which ultimately come down to research shortages, and the big countries that could finance space travel are the ones most competitive for resources so they are the least motivated to try and solve those problems right now. Of course by the time those problems being a crisis big enough to seriously threaten the potentially space capable powers it's unlikely the resources would exist to get us into space.

Right now the biggest issue is of course materials, we should be less concerned with getting a manned base on Mars, and become more concerned with looking for minerals in the asteroid belts for example. After all we're already strip mining the planet to death to meet the current metal needs on the planet. The first step towards something like this of course would be to probably establish a permanent or semi-permanent community on the moon to act as a waypoint from which ships can be manufactured and launched without requiring every single one of them to have to blast through Earth's atmosphere or worry about re-entry which are a big part of what makes things so expensive. Hypothetically speaking moon colonies could produce mining vessels capable of harvesting the asteroid fields, and only very specific shuttles and transports would have to move through the atmosphere (carrying minerals or whatever). One big step after the establishment of a lunar colony would of course be the development of a so called "Space Elevator" (of which there are a number of hypothetical ideas) which would of course make getting through the atmosphere increasingly easier.

Without getting into all the back and forth about hypothetical ideas, the short form is that we need to get out there in baby steps. Heading right out to put men on mars is cool, but we'd do better to begin establishing an orbital and lunar infrastructure to use as a springboard. Landing on mars would be exciting, and allow us to understand it better in a scientific sense, but ultimately there is little benefit to having people on such a hostile environment just for the sake of having them be there and tell us how weird it is. That's something we should do, but first a practical infrastructure needs to happen, along with looking towards what benefits we can reap from the solar system that can help defer and justify costs.... once we have the infrastructure that makes large scale mining and transport to the planet possible, the mineral wealth inherent in the asteroid fields is going to more than justify the expense.

That said, as I've pointed out before, I don't see any of this happening without a massive population reduction here on earth, along with unifying the planet into one global government/culture. We need to get the population down to the point where we're at least not running at a total resource deficit and can thus invest in the programs without people going "well gee, these people can't feed themselves, and yet we're launching people into space in preparation to launch rocks". What's more multiple nations cannot exist, specifically because of the paranoia that fueled the space race and other innovations, and the way how that kind of thing could rapidly spiral out of control. You simply cannot have multiple nations bickering over lunar territory or space elevator access, and similar things when the focus has to remain on space itself. Furthermore with multiple nations all it takes is one nation to hit some motherlode and have
it disputed for things to turn into a war that could annihilate earth given the sheer amount of stuff that will be in orbit and could be thrown back down on the planet during fighting. All it takes is for some major country to say find an asteroid the size of Manhattan made out of solid gold, or something, and then have that claim disputed. Gold can still be a massive economic boost, and is used in some manufacturing. Something like that which could seriously sway the power balance on Earth (and it could be a lot of things, that's just an off-kilter example) if there are multiple nations is going to start a nightmare. God forbid what happens if some aliens show up and say "Ahh, you humans are now off your planet so we can approach you... take me to your leader" when sadly we don't HAVE a leader since we're divided into different nations and nobody can speak for Earth or get the planet to react quickly if the need arose...

That said, I believe working on the space program is something that needs to be going on in any environment. People just need to realize that we're not going to be able to see any large scale, permanent usage of that technology until the world substantially changes, and that means a least one major nightmare needing to happen to change the world for the better.... depressing, but there you go.

 

[Queen Michael]

Because you never know what you will discover until you already have.

Because learning and exploring are worthwile endeavours in and of themselves.

Because now and then we ought to do something even though the purpose isn't money.