Nikolai

I had six rockets en route to Duna with payloads that would be assembled together in that planet's orbit when they got there, and a rover/lander I'd refueled in Kerbin orbit waiting to blast off after them. I was so eager to use 0.20 that I didn't mind the lost work.

Playing all stock -- that's just what I like to do -- and have tried all the new parts, built and driven a few rovers, and launched things to and from orbit, to Mun and back, and to Minmus (not back yet... will try after traveling tonight). So far, it's all been slicker than snot on a doorknob. It runs much smoother and much faster than 0.19 did, even when I try to throw things with all kinds of parts onto the pad. I'll have to load it on my daughter's computer when we return. There was one point where the editor seemed to get confused when I took out the two new probe cores to look at them side-by-side, but it's entirely possible that I got confused about which one I'd picked first. If I can manage to duplicate it, it's the only thing I'd classify as a bug, and it didn't even interrupt the software's execution.

Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the MERs. It was a glib estimate which I'm using for some obviously oversimplified calculations, as I mentioned before. Certainly not merely traversing distance. I doubt Squyres' point was that the MERs could only move at one ten-thousandth the velocity of a human. Neither can the rovers/landers. I was being generous by allowing them to work continuously. In reality, they can be somewhat autonomous, but they need a lot of input from the people back on Earth to carry out a geological survey intelligently. If they really need this particular instrument to figure out the mineral composition of rocks and soil -- which would seem odd for a trained geologist -- they can bring it with them and put it on the ground and let it work. Do you seriously think that Apollo astronauts brought no instruments with them?

I never measured or compared distance. Try again.

Let me illustrate the principle of "break-even" with this example. It's simplified, yes, but it helps to illustrate the point. Let's say that our crew was only able to spend 10% of their surface time -- 1.8 months -- doing useful work. And let's say that it cost $30 billion. And a rover works at one ten-thousandth of the rate of a human. The same work, done with rovers, would last 72,000 months -- or 6000 years. Let's say that you can make a really phenomenal rover that will last five years and can continuously operate the entire time. That's 1200 rovers to do the equivalent work of your crew of four with a 10% duty cycle. Now, for it to be cost effective, each rover has to cost less than twenty-five million dollars, including support -- which sounds like a lot until you actually start building one.

That's only the most dramatic kind of reassessment. It's also possible that -- as we see with our attempts to reconcile orbital measurements with ground measurements on Mars -- your initial assessments could be off, and you might end up needing to re-analyze the geology on the fly and return different samples from what you originally thought you wanted. And again, a human can re-assess ten thousand times faster than a robot with a camera, a spectrometer, and a ground crew.

What you seem to be missing is that there's a break-even point. It's not the case that once you send a lander, (a) you'll succeed as long as the lander doesn't fail; nor is it the case that ( everything after the sending of the lander is a sunk cost, and everything else you get for free. To address (a), there's no way for a lander to adapt if initial hypotheses are "wrong enough". A human can adapt on the fly. To be sure, a human mission can still be "wrong enough" to fail, but those parameters are much broader; and hopefully, we have some basic robotic recon at that point anyway. When it comes to (, we need to ask how much searching time is enough. If a lander can be expected to return a piece of information in, say, ten thousand times the amount of time a human would take (to make Squyres' glib estimate work), then we need to ask whether it's cost-effective to pay the engineers, scientists, technicians, ground support, custodians, etc., etc. for ten thousand times the amount of ground time or whether it's more cost-effective to build a manned program. To be sure, it's much more of a bargain when those times are short; but as our understanding deepens and we need more detail, sending humans gets more and more beneficial. That's why I refer to the depth of scientific knowledge required. If you want to get a basic overview, a machine is much more cost-effective to send into the hazardous environment of space. But there comes a point when sending machines is more expensive simply because designing a machine to last long enough (or sending enough machines to make up the difference) to seek knowledge deeper than what we currently have is prohibitive. (More humans can be built with unskilled labor, after all; even though they're squishy, they're adaptable and smart.)

It's not just a question of what it is. It's also a question of context, of knowing what to examine where in more detail than mere pictures and spectroscopic analysis can provide but which don't require full-fledged labs. You need to be able to piece together processes, and where the key evidence of those processes would be located and what structures to look for when you get there, not just presence or absence of minerals. Again, I recommend Roving Mars. The author goes into enough geological detail, minimal though it is for a lay audience, and shows some instances when pictures and Mossbauer spectra were decidedly deficient in providing the kind of in situ analysis and judgment-making that is trivial for an educated human, but which Spirit and Opportunity could not hope to duplicate.

Of course not. But we're talking about costly missions here. One wants to get the maximum return for one's investment. That's why, as I mentioned above, you want different methods of exploration at different times. Planetary geologists who choose landing sites would like to disagree with you. I'd also like to point out important, critical, and unexpected discoveries made by humans on the site, e.g., the Genesis Rock from Apollo 15. True. I mentioned that myself, and even pointed out that that's advantageous. Patently false. If you pay attention to, for example, the scientists struggling to piece Gale Crater and Mount Sharp's history together as we speak, you'd see that it's not nearly as simple as you're pretending. They're not only trying to put together what's happened there, they're trying to reconcile what they're finding with measurements taken from Martian orbit. Please stop making stuff up -- especially oversimplifying -- and pretending that you know exactly how capable a machines-alone approach would be.

Evidence? People who've worked on rovers and have to know their top-to-bottom capabilities disagree with you; I quoted one. Some might even point to the need to bring humans back in the early stages of exploration as a feature, not a bug; collection and prolonged study of contextualized samples is the real driver of scientific knowledge. You need some things to sit there; some things to bring stuff back; and after a certain point, you need some things that can recognize important things even when they're not expected or anticipated. The case for space exploration, and especially manned space exploration, is multifaceted and requires the careful weighing of several interrelated factors. Attempting to handwave these things away by pointing out that machines can, in a limited capacity, mimic some of these same activities (as long as you don't examine the activities themselves too closely) is not convincing. After all, one could just as easily point out that remote observation is cheaper than sending spacecraft to the site; why not let all of our exploration be done with instruments in orbit(*)? At some point, the details of exploration make different methods of exploration relevant. (*) Some actually argued this with respect to Voyager; as it was wrapping up its mission in the outer Solar System, ground-based and orbital observatories were making discoveries in advance of the probe.

Yes, if the only factor in a sample return were scooping up some surface material and returning it. Part of the advantage of humans -- and also the reason that lunar astronauts were trained in graduate-level geology -- is that we have the ability to put findings in context. We can walk through an area and get a surface-level analysis of what happened to shape which geological features. We can use that to determine which areas require deeper study, and which samples within those areas are likely to offer answers to the questions we have. This has proven fiendishly difficult to mechanize -- hence the sound bites that crop up every once in a while on the matter from people who are involved in robotic exploration, like Steve Squyres pointing out in Roving Mars that both MERs combined could "do in a perfect sol(*) [what] a human explorer could do in less than a minute". Apollo really showcased that. By necessity, contact with the lunar surface was tremendously short, but the return was immense -- leagues ahead of anything unmanned exploration could offer, or still can. We also hope to live places other than Earth eventually -- well, some of us do, anyway, and it makes sense for the long-term survival of the species and/or its descendants -- and every little bit we learn about space travel helps that. There is also some difficult-to-assess value in simply having a capability. While it's difficult to gauge exactly how much it's worth, what it means to industry, innovation, engineering capability, managerial capability, and technical capability can't simply be handwaved away. It's also not simple and straightforward to assume that unmanned will always be cheaper. I invite you to look at the cost of, for example, Viking versus Pathfinder versus MER versus MSL versus MSR, expressed in constant dollars. Yes, each is growing in capability and sophistication, but that's the point. Sure, there are all sorts of applications where robots are the only option -- and regardless, space is a hazardous environment, so you want to send robots first. But sending them "instead of" rather than "ahead of" is an enormously short-sighted mistake -- both in terms of the depth of science involved and in terms of the eventual future of our species. (*) That is, a Martian day. And he knows whereof he speaks -- he was the project leader (the technical job title is "Principal Investigator") for the MER missions.

I like Verdi's "Anvil Chorus" and Poledouris's "Anvil of Krom" when I'm putting together rockets. The soundtracks to Star Trek II and Star Trek VI are chock-full of tracks that are fun while I'm launching/maneuvering. That's a start.

There's some fundamental tension there, since artists and inventors who cannot compete (with, for example, economies of scale) need to make a living; at the same time, they're restrictions on free speech ("You can say whatever you want, as long as it's not too similar to what that guy over there said") and free creativity. I think the founders of the U.S. Constitution understood that, which is why the Copyright Clause (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) guarantees protection to authors and inventors "for limited Times" (emphasis mine). Of course, this sort of thing has been subject to abuse, because intellectual property has become a rather substantial revenue stream for some rather heavy hitters. There's a saying that you can expect copyright terms to increase in length whenever the copyright on Mickey Mouse is due to expire, for example. I don't think it's one of the most evil things governments do, but it is certainly something that can be (and is being, IMHO) abused in a way that makes society less well off generally. There's a heritage to be explored in the fairy tales of Europe from centuries ago, for example -- and you can only discuss, say, Snow White as long as the discussion doesn't wander too close to a particular megacorporation's incarnation of that story. I don't like the idea of restricting free speech in perpetuity, but I also like the idea of allowing innovators to do something exclusive with their work for a while as a reward for extraordinary creativity. I can't think of a good solution that would satisfy everyone.

Back in the heyday of Star Control II, someone made a quick set of rules for converting the different aliens to GURPS characters so people could make and play tabletop RPGs if they so desired. There were a few dozen races in that game. (If you haven't played it, go to sc2.sourceforge.net and download the open-source version, dubbed "The Ur-Quan Masters" because Atari owns the rights to the name "Star Control". Seriously, get it. It's a lot of fun.) Anyway, one of the things they threw out there was that Humans are relatively small compared to most intelligent species, and we're still pretty closely related to arboreal mammals. Which means that if you need something to clamber up into a tight space, or if you need a task that requires physical dexterity and flexibility, get a Human; we're like little spider monkeys compared to most of them. We're also somewhat frighteningly adept at applying new concepts. We sent murmurs through the sentient races of the galaxy when we went from putting the first Human in space to walking around on the surface of our homeworld's satellite in less than a decade. When we were asked for help out of desperation in an intergalactic war without our even having left the Solar System, the interstellar alliance that asked us for help was shocked to find that we, a relatively primitive technological species, had nuclear weapons. Lots of them. All of this is empty conjecture, of course, but it's fun to speculate. A co-worker of mine toyed with the idea of trying to write a story about aliens that lacked sense organs that could detect subtle pressure changes in the atmosphere in the form of "sound waves"; the fact that we could communicate with one another without a direct line-of-sight was nothing short of miraculous to them.

You mean the NTRS? It's back online. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp

Sorry to snip for brevity's sake, but this was all fascinating, thank you. And now I know which book I have to read next -- I've read a ton of astronaut memoirs, but not nearly enough about design.

Oh, I don't mean to accuse them of stupidity or wastefulness. Just trying to tap into the cleverness of space enthusiasts who might have heard or thought of something that was overlooked.

I don't know about the CSM, obviously, but I was under the impression that the Saturn V was over-designed from the beginning to push out the mass margins. They had to do a lot of testing to remove the transient and steady-state responses to engine impulse on a case-by-case basis, I know, and that made things expensive... can you point to documentation of the need to increase performance beyond the original specifications?

"Math" is not a noun that refers only to a collection of numbers. It's a discipline, short for "mathematics", and like "physics", "economics", "gymnastics", et cetera, tends to be treated as a singular noun in spite of the "s" at the end. (Besides, we don't tend to keep the "s" in the short form of a noun. We don't use "gyms" as a short form for "gymnastics"(*). Which is grammatically correct: "Mathematics is my best subject", or "Mathematics are my best subject"? Or, if you prefer, "Maths is my best subject", or "Maths are my best subject"? There's some debate on the subject, obviously, but there are things to be considered on both sides. (*) Though, obviously, we do for "gymnasiums", where the noun itself is plural.

A Super Weight Improvement Program. It was Grumman's way of stripping all non-essential mass from the spacecraft, with a dozen experts in structures, mass property, thermodynamics, and electronics, whose task was to second-guess the whole design in order to bring the LM below weight margins. They succeeded spectacularly. It also made the spacecraft substantially more fragile, as well as more costly and time-consuming to manufacture, but those were considered to be worth the cost. My question is meant to pretend that that wasn't enough. How could we cut down on the CSM to save mass?

... what do you think they would cut? What could be removed quickly? What systems would take some time to re-jigger? Keep in mind that this thing has to be able to re-enter the atmosphere and keep those onboard alive.

Further, definitely. More intimately? We're still working on that. Especially if you compare technological apples to apples. The scientific return per dollar from Apollo was much greater than the scientific return per dollar from unmanned lunar exploration.

Gene Cernan was reprimanded for swearing on Apollo 10. And while he was careful on the air, my personal favorite astronaut, Pete Conrad, was said to have sworn like a sailor in private life. (Which, considering he was Navy, is probably appropriate.)

Um, no. As long as we're talking about cultural impact or impact on spaceflight capability, the US beat the Soviet Union prior to landing on the Moon in: * First communications satellite * First weather satellite * First spy satellite * First successful satellite return from orbit * First pilot-controlled spaceflight * First satellite navigation system * First piloted spacecraft orbital change * First geosynchronous and first geostationary satellites * First orbital rendezvous * First reusable spacecraft * First spacecraft docking The Soviets certainly had a head start, but by the time rendezvous and docking came about, the U.S. pretty much had taken the lead.

The official website touts it as the most realistic space travel depicted in a movie yet. And I like the setting. It's impossible to get any idea about the plot or characters from the trailer, though.