Man vs. Probe.

[Kryten]

55 minutes ago, Elthy said:

A human (trained in geology or similar) will be way, way faster than a rover in walking around the surface and watching for interessting rocks. Imagine what you have to do to get a rover to turn over a specific rock or dig a hole. Just getting a rover to take a closer look at something which is 100m away takes ages, while a human would simply walk there...

But we're not sending up rovers just to look at rocks, we're sending them up to get mineralogical data which takes time to gather. APXS in particular can take days to get a good reading.

[tater]

Note that I can be in favor of manned spaceflight, but I can do so without deluding myself that somehow "boots on the ground" = more/better science gains.

If we're going to go to the trouble of sending people, then yeah, they will attempt to maximize scientific return. The $ per unit science done will always be higher with people going vs robots, however.

[PB666]

17 minutes ago, tater said:

Note that I can be in favor of manned spaceflight, but I can do so without deluding myself that somehow "boots on the ground" = more/better science gains.

If we're going to go to the trouble of sending people, then yeah, they will attempt to maximize scientific return. The $ per unit science done will always be higher with people going vs robots, however.

You'll be pressed to convince some people, my past experience with c is that there is a certain amount of stuubornness. There is a believe out by some that a Mars manned mision can be done right now but there is some sort of conflict/conspiracy holding it up. A few individuals don't seem to understand there are areas where the science need to be improved or it could be very expensive. The technology in other areas of solid science needs to be fleshed out, and wrapping those things together is an engineering challenge that, in and of itself, could take years. Most aspects could be done now at great cost, e.g. a mars diemos or phobos manned sample collect is possible. 

[tater]

Yeah, the challenges for manned Mars are non-trivial, particularly given the risk-averse nature of NASA planning (not a bad thing, there's no plan B halfway to Mars unless you thought about it ahead of time).

It's interesting to note that we haven't sent anything like a current state of the art robot rover anywhere yet. I'd say the state of the art is now private, not NASA. It will be interesting to see rover designs that incorporate the lessons of self-driving car research. Imagine Google during millions of simulated kms of offroad driving per day and applying that to Mars rover technology.

[Superfluous J]

Curiosity cost 2.5 billion, according to one hit I got on Google and am too lazy to vet.

People here have said it'll cost 300 billion to send people to mars. Which probably means 500 at least.

So the question is, can you do more with 100-200 rovers, or a single team of people?

I don't actually know that one but my non-existent money's on the robots

[Snark]

2 hours ago, Elthy said:

A human (trained in geology or similar) will be way, way faster than a rover in walking around the surface and watching for interessting rocks.

 

1 hour ago, YNM said:

But the rover would stay there for months looking around while the human have families and friends to look at. Similar end results.

And the human will run out of air / water / food and have to come back after a fairly short period of time, whereas the rover can stay there for years.

Also, bear in mind, when you're talking about how the human is "faster" ... you also need to include the extra 10 or 20 years spent planning and preparing the human mission.  You get a decade or two of rover observations, for far less money, before your human geologist even leaves the launchpad.

1 hour ago, Atlas2342 said:

But humans are better at well, human activities. They can act independently, think of ways to solve problems and others.

Yes.  And the rover has that.  A bunch of scientists sitting in comfy chairs back on Earth, telling it what to do.

It's true that it does everything in slow motion.  You tell the rover to do something, it takes several minutes for the signal to go to Mars and back.  And you need to have the rover move cautiously, so that it doesn't get itself wedged in an unrecoverable situation.

But you've got all the time in the world.  A well-designed rover can last for a really long time.  Spirit and Opportunity, with their vulnerable solar panels, lasted for years.  No telling yet how long nuclear-powered Curiosity will be able to go, but I bet it's at least that long.

And you can blanket the planet with dozens of rovers in dozens of locations for the same cost as putting a human in one spot.

As for the "humans can do things rovers can't" ... that's true.  And there are also things rovers can do that humans can't.  The difference being that the former category is shrinking rapidly as technology advances, whereas the latter category stands pat.

There's simply no valid scientific or economic reason to send humans now.  And the bias continues to shift rapidly in the robotic direction.

This makes me sad, because on a purely irrational level, I wantz Martian astronauts NAO.  It's a case of my brain telling me something that my heart doesn't want to listen to.  I love the idea of boots on the ground, and really really really want there to be a reason to do so.  It makes me sad that there isn't one.

Doesn't mean it'll never happen, but it'll have to be for the "just because" reasons already mentioned.

[tater]

@Snark is spot on. I would reiterate as well that part of the slow-motion is the superabundance of caution used. 

2.5 billion is a lot of money, even if it is dirt cheap compared to a manned mission. The researchers know that this rover might be the single biggest scientific effort of their own lifetimes, so they don't want to biff it. If they were budgeted hundreds of billions, such that perhaps the rovers were cheaper because of some economies of scale in production, and per haps also just cheaper robots, because they are sending many, so all their eggs are not in one basket, then they could be a little more aggressive in their use. Combined with better self-driving capability, they could cover ground faster. Honestly, I think this is just a matter of time.

[ValleyTwo]

Okay.  Let us look at the costs.

$175,000,000 per Mars probe with lander and a rover.  I think in the future this price tag will drop as we allow the computers to design the equipment but let us pick this number for now.

$40,000,000,000 per Mars manned mission.  I think it will likely cost more than that, but let us say it is only one person and they develop some high tech stuff when it happens.

Okay.  For the cost of a manned mission I get 228.571428571 unmanned missions according to the calculator.  Let us round up to 229 unmanned missions.

Now, the rate of success when getting unmanned probes/rovers/landers/anything to Mars is under 50% (so far).  I think it was 4something - so let us be safe, lower that, and say 40%.

That comes out to 91.6 so let us round it down to 91 unmanned mission.  So for $40 billion dollars we can get 91 unmanned probes to Mars. Losing 137.4 of the probes (60%).  Or 138 fail.

What kind of science can the people of Earth do is they landed 91 unmanned probes onto Mars vs. one manned mission (which as of right NOW has the success rate less then 50%).

 

Of course this numbers may change in the near or far future but let us say, for the moment for this little debate, that they are close to reality.  Does this change anybody's view point on the subject?

And let me point out - a human on Mars can stumble, fall over, and break his neck.

 

 

 

Edited May 28, 2016 by ValleyTwo

[Pipcard]

To those saying "manned spaceflight is never worth it": is that the same philosophy you hold when you play KSP?

Edited May 28, 2016 by Pipcard

[Snark]

31 minutes ago, Pipcard said:

To those saying "manned spaceflight is never worth it": is that the same philosophy you hold when you play KSP?

Nope.  Because I really want manned spaceflight to be worth it, and it makes me sad that it isn't.

KSP is a cheerful place I can go where the rules are different and I can have fun in a world where it works the way I like. (And mod it if it doesn't!)

[PB666]

48 minutes ago, Pipcard said:

To those saying "manned spaceflight is never worth it": is that the same philosophy you hold when you play KSP?

For the no-land missions, I man my space factories for obvious reasons, this is used to build remote ISRU for landing.

I then build up resources in ISRU.

Landing , I only man colonization missions, because with the ISRU addons you need engineers, but its also an end-goal of the game to establish livable facilities off world.

 

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Here's an idea: send a vehicle to Mars, this vehicle has a rover which gathers about 400-600lbs of Mars rocks and loads them onto a return vehicle which comes back to Earth. NASA keeps about 10-20lbs of rocks for study and auctions the rest off to pay for the mission. So, the science gained from launching a heavy-ish return vehicle would be valuable, as well as the cargo.

[tater]

2 hours ago, Pipcard said:

To those saying "manned spaceflight is never worth it": is that the same philosophy you hold when you play KSP?

It entirely depends on how one is defining "worth."

If the metric is "amount" of science done, then manned isn't worth it. If the metric is a sense of adventure, spirit of discovery, exceptionalism, however you want to put it, then I think it is worth it. I send loads of probes in KSP, actually, since I almost always play with LS, and a scaled up system, getting crew to distant places is hard.

[PB666]

1 hour ago, Waxing_Kibbous said:

Here's an idea: send a vehicle to Mars, this vehicle has a rover which gathers about 400-600lbs of Mars rocks and loads them onto a return vehicle which comes back to Earth. NASA keeps about 10-20lbs of rocks for study and auctions the rest off to pay for the mission. So, the science gained from launching a heavy-ish return vehicle would be valuable, as well as the cargo.

So the fed. gov. going to charge scienrist to study the rocks, which btw NSF and the EU science fund. The idea gets worse cause then the researches can charge NASA to use any research they produce, and it will never get published. Thats what you call a lose, lose, lose, lose scenario. 

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Waxing_Kibbous said:

Here's an idea: send a vehicle to Mars, this vehicle has a rover which gathers about 400-600lbs of Mars rocks and loads them onto a return vehicle which comes back to Earth. NASA keeps about 10-20lbs of rocks for study and auctions the rest off to pay for the mission. So, the science gained from launching a heavy-ish return vehicle would be valuable, as well as the cargo.

That's assuming that the market value of the samples actually is enough to pay for the mission.  I seem to recall that the US gave samples of moon rock to various countries around the world as a gesture of goodwill.  Decades later, someone went round to try to track them all down, and it seemed that an awful lot of them simply got misplaced.  Doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would happen to a seriously valued commodity.

(And I don't think you can scale it up by bringing back more rocks, either.  The value is a function of the rarity.  I suspect that the total market value of all the rocks you bring back will be a constant, regardless of the amount.)

[PB666]

1 minute ago, Snark said:

That's assuming that the market value of the samples actually is enough to pay for the mission.  I seem to recall that the US gave samples of moon rock to various countries around the world as a gesture of goodwill.  Decades later, someone went round to try to track them all down, and it seemed that an awful lot of them simply got misplaced.  Doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would happen to a seriously valued commodity.

(And I don't think you can scale it up by bringing back more rocks, either.  The value is a function of the rarity.  I suspect that the total market value of all the rocks you bring back will be a constant, regardless of the amount.)

They move around, after one researcher finished they send them to the next guy. BTW the apollo missions collected alot of these things. You would just be surprised what you find in the back corners of some labs, thats not even close to what you find in -80'c freezers. 

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Just now, Snark said:

That's assuming that the market value of the samples actually is enough to pay for the mission.  I seem to recall that the US gave samples of moon rock to various countries around the world as a gesture of goodwill.  Decades later, someone went round to try to track them all down, and it seemed that an awful lot of them simply got misplaced.  Doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would happen to a seriously valued commodity.

(And I don't think you can scale it up by bringing back more rocks, either.  The value is a function of the rarity.  I suspect that the total market value of all the rocks you bring back will be a constant, regardless of the amount.)

Nah, just leave the marketing up to De Beers.

My cynical guess would be that most "misplaced" moon rocks ended up in private collections.

[Ten Key]

1 hour ago, Snark said:

Nope.  Because I really want manned spaceflight to be worth it, and it makes me sad that it isn't.

There was a Skype conversation between a group of younger writers (mid twenties) I wandered into a while ago, about Fallout 3. Mostly about world building and such, and in this case they were talking about the last expansion. The "boss fight", if you will, involves an encounter with a NASA Crawler that has been rebuilt as a mobile fortress. I said something along the lines of, "Yeah, a lot of people don't realize just how big those things really are" and linked a picture of one that had people standing along side it. And the conversation stopped. The channel was quiet for a long moment, and then. . .

"THAT THING IS REAL?!?"

Some time later, a few weeks before the New Horizons encounter with Pluto, the same group of people asked me to explain to them why the flyby was important. And ultimately, I couldn't. For them, it boiled down to an awful lot of money spent for some pictures of an ice ball and a bunch of scientific papers that were never going to impact them in any meaningful way. Try as I might, I couldn't really fault their logic. These folks are pretty far away from being the dregs of the internet. And they vote.

When it comes to "pure" science (we can have the argument about applied science some other time), the combination of durability and disposability makes robots unbeatable. But while science is part of exploration, it is not the whole of it, and it is a mistake to discount the adventure inherent in manned spaceflight. Few of the people being asked to pay for our space programs will ever get to make the journey themselves, and most of those have no interest in the chemical composition of Martian regolith. Goodness, the spellchecker in Chrome doesn't even recognize "regolith" as a word! But the advances in telepresence that are making our robots better are also making it easier for people to experience manned spaceflight vicariously from the comfort of home. And when it comes to encouraging voter support for space flight, that is important.

Scientists have always had to balance their research with the needs and wants of their patrons. In today's world, manned spaceflight is a necessary part of that equation.

[FleshJeb]

51 minutes ago, Ten Key said:

But while science is part of exploration, it is not the whole of it, and it is a mistake to discount the adventure inherent in manned spaceflight.

There's a myth that human beings are capable of being perfectly rational creatures, or that this is even the optimal state. I attribute this worldview to the devaluing of liberal-arts education.

For reasons of evolutionary biology, we NEED physical frontiers. Discounting and devaluing this need is foolish, not pragmatic, and not realistic.

[Snark]

2 hours ago, Ten Key said:

<excellent story>

Scientists have always had to balance their research with the needs and wants of their patrons. In today's world, manned spaceflight is a necessary part of that equation.

No argument there.  And I haven't seen any posts in this thread that disagree with your point.  Nobody's been saying "no one should ever go to space"-- just that it's not worth it in terms of science and dollars, and that the reason has to be a just-because.  What you've just described is exactly such a just-because.

"Wow factor" is important.  It's why NASA's web site is as jazzed-up and professional-looking as it is, rather than being the sort of cringeworthy eyesore that you always get when scientists or engineers are putting a website together.  (Important lesson learned from decades in the software industry:  never, ever let the engineers design the web UI...)

A manned mission to Mars has a much higher wow-factor-per-day than a rover.

On the other hand... the rover can keep going for months or years.  I don't mean to say that "it lasts N times longer so that gives it N times the wow factor", since clearly that's not the way it works-- people get used to it and forget that it's there.  But if there were to ever be a really incredible, headline-grabbing piece of news about the science of mars-- for example, suppose we ever find incontrovertible evidence of life-- it's much more likely that we'll get that from a rover, just because we can have a lot more of them doing a lot more science in a lot more places over a much longer time.

And there's also cost.  A manned mission has more wow-factor than a rover... but does it have a hundred times?  Actually, literally, a hundred times, since it's a hundred times the cost?  The New Horizons mission cost each American $2.50 over 15 years.  A manned Mars mission, with a price tag that's more likely to be hundreds of dollars per American, is a harder sell.

So the numbers still enter into it.  But yes-- point very well taken.

[Kryten]

15 hours ago, Pipcard said:

To those saying "manned spaceflight is never worth it": is that the same philosophy you hold when you play KSP?

KSP is a video game.

[YNM]

19 hours ago, Pipcard said:

To those saying "manned spaceflight is never worth it": is that the same philosophy you hold when you play KSP?

To the fullest extent, yes. I always map the landing areas first. Getting science off it as well. Not so much for sending rovers as the endpoint is the "pride" side of the equation. In fact, lately I've been wondering how to do "cool" missions like Cassini, Galileo or even MESSENGER and GRAIL for their cheap, science-rich trajectories.

Problems have been about making "send a kerbal" to become very, very burdening. I mean, holding life in space without massive amount of supports ? Easy communication ? Always fit condition, despite no exercise ?

My previous computers couldn't hold as much mods it'd require to play in RO, so I haven't tested it.

Edited May 29, 2016 by YNM

[PB666]

26 minutes ago, YNM said:

To the fullest extent, yes. I always map the landing areas first. Getting science off it as well. Not so much for sending rovers as the endpoint is the "pride" side of the equation. In fact, lately I've been wondering how to do "cool" missions like Cassini, Galileo or even MESSENGER and GRAIL for their cheap, science-rich trajectories.

Problems have been about making "send a kerbal" to become very, very burdening. I mean, holding life in space without massive amount of supports ? Easy communication ? Always fit condition, despite no exercise ?

My previous computers couldn't hold as much mods it'd require to play in RO, so I haven't tested it.

Right now, in the current state of thechnology, if you sent an actual living human being to Mars, there would be several possible fates

1. Die before reaching Mars SOI. i give this about 10%

2. Die while trying to land on Mars. i'de give this about 30% now with the proficiencies musk has shown

3. Die from suffocation when the last of the air reserves/purification runs out. About 50%. musk has no exoertise in this area. Only so much payload can be delivered to Mars surface in a single shot.

4. Die from starvation. 15%. Only so much payload can be delivered to mars surface. 

5. Die attempting to get off Mars. 5% (100% of all attempts)

until we are talking about staging supply ships and space tugs carrying supplies between mars and Earth, we are not talking about a viable mars mission, no matter what Musk says. 

Until you have more efficient roboticized deep space delivery systems it make no sense what so ever to talk about an greatly increased manned presence in space. You need to inrease the reliability of delivering things to mars SOI and increase the efficiency of the propulsion systems so that those systems can deliver more.

This is not contradicting you, but the shear infrastuture required to keep people alive for even a few months on Mars and getting them back is enourmous. I try to keep this in mind when i play KSP, i try to get the infrastructure out in advance of my manned missions. The first thing that i try to get up is a space factory that can assemble stuff in space. This means i can do spacex style missions with packed structures and essentially no nosecone cause packed metal makes a good nosecone, if you model it. All you need is a docking port, side mounted engines on the final structure. 

The central problem is that there are alot of resources in Kerbins SOI that are high up relative  to Kerbins gravity well. Earths gravity well is 10 times deep, requires 3.16x dV to get out of and its sole resource base in SOI has a gravity almost equal to kerbin. 

Unless you can bring a resource base into Earths SOI, preferentially L2 (comets) or L1 (asteroids) you really don't have anything to build on. Building moon bases, IMO, no matter how optimistic one is solely for moon science and associated technological development and offworld epidemiology studies. To make an external resource base useful there is no choice but to get it out of the gravity well, and frankly nothing distal to earth carries insolance required to power anything creative.  So basically my early system exploration would involve three things. 

1. Hauling boloids into Eaths la grange pts 1 and 2

2. Hauling bolloids into venusian la grange comparables

3. Polar landings on mercury, just to see how much the mercurian surface offers

4. Can we change the climate of Venus by cooling it down from its L1 enough to stop its run away greehouse. My prediction is that if we could drop the insolance to Earths, that over time its atmosphere would collapse to something fractional to earths. 

 

[DBowman]

There is a middle road also - use an extended flyby to provide low latency human interaction with robotic elements. Apparently you can arrange a Mars flyby to pull the craft off the ecliptic so it stays 'near' mars for half an orbit then you encounter again and get pulled into an Earth encounter, alternate is to capture to Sun/Mars L1. It's a 900 day trajectory with 360 days 'near' Mars. A two man version of this was estimated by Zubrin (of course) as Athena at 2.2 Billion USD ( 0.9 B was shuttle and Proton launches - which should be much cheaper 'real soon'). It completely skips the hardest, most expensive, and dangerous parts of a manned Mars mission (capture, EDL, ground ops, ascent, TEI) - but does something (potentially) more useful than a 'classic' flyby.

I don't know how to value the low latency delivered.

One effect is simply multiplying the utility per time of the robotic elements. You'd have to get more done quicker, maybe there are existing estimates of the effect. If not it seems like the kind of thing one could experiment with on earth with university teams running mockups with Mars vs low latency. It seems like one could then make some kind of economic predictions about any direct $ payoff from low latency.

Flow on effects from a higher pace of discovery is that the current 'mission' (whatever robotic elements are there to be controlled) has higher momentum. This could translate to higher mind share / support in the general population. It could also increase the possible cadence of subsequent mission launches - if our knowledge of ground truth is four years advanced (say) then the next round of robots can leave four years earlier. These effects seem harder to quantify.

[YNM]

Not much different IMHO. Equal amount of life support, in fact more danger due to lack of something we can call thin atmosphere. The idea is based on Mars-Sun L2 (or L1 ?).

May as well send an army of robots and relay sats there.