The Space Review: "Why a business case for Mars settlement is not required"

[mikegarrison]

1 hour ago, IncongruousGoat said:

there are several international treaties preventing any and all exploitation of Antarctic resources for economic gain, by public or private entities

Yes -- and the treaties that forbid the same off Earth are actually directly modeled on the Antarctic treaties.

Granted, the Outer Space Treaty is a little fuzzy about outright prohibiting private exploitation, but it clearly prohibits private or public ownership of anything in "outer space".

Edited April 9, 2020 by mikegarrison

[DDE]

2 hours ago, IncongruousGoat said:

Beyond that, though, there are several international treaties preventing any and all exploitation of Antarctic resources for economic gain, by public or private entities.

A treaty is a relative impediment rather than a showstopper. It's more likely that what little is known about Antarctic resources is not particularly attractive compared to the Arctic. And we all know the rhetoric around the Arctic in the last few decades.

1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

Granted, the Outer Space Treaty is a little fuzzy about outright prohibiting private exploitation, but it clearly prohibits private or public ownership of anything in "outer space".

And, oh, look, an excellent example of a treaty being sidestepped into oblivion by those actually interested in breaking it.

On that note,

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The Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, better known as the Moon Treaty or Moon Agreement, is a multilateral treaty that turns jurisdiction of all celestial bodies (including the orbits around such bodies) over to the participant countries. Thus, all activities would conform to international law, including the United Nations Charter.

It has not been ratified by any state that engages in self-launched human spaceflight or has plans to do so

 

[wafflemoder]

8 hours ago, IncongruousGoat said:

I find the Antarctica comparison not particularly compelling, for several reasons. First, Antarctica is actually worse (i.e. less habitable) than Mars by some measures. There's less available sunlight, especially during the winter months, meaning less consistently available solar power, and Earth's atmosphere is much thicker than Mars's, which corresponds to faster heat loss. Beyond that, though, there are several international treaties preventing any and all exploitation of Antarctic resources for economic gain, by public or private entities. The population of Antarctica is low because, beyond anything else, it's illegal to do anything there other than research. Were that not the case, I'm sure we would see mining and oil towns in Antarctica, and at least one settlement that could be described as a city (to function as a port of entry, among other things). The population wouldn't be high, by any means - but it would be a lot higher than what it is today.

Yes, solar power is arguably worse in Antarctica than on Mars, but all other forms of power gen are superior (especially wind). Regarding legalities, Mars and other celestial bodies also have their fair share of international treaties limiting how they can be utilized. Currently these are not enforced, but I imagine the situation will change once someone is in a position to actually profit from it.

[tater]

Antarctica is not worse than Mars.

Humans can breath there. QED.

That makes it pretty much infinitely better than Mars. I think people are interested in human space exploration (I certainly am), and I think @mikegarrison is right that people will go because they want to go. That said, the rationale for a colony is different (vs an outpost). A colony requires sustainability, and without major external inputs, no such colony is possible. If it was self-sustaining, you could talk about some sort of business case (intellectual property, whatever) to buy luxury goods, but it must be 100% independent before that is a thing, IMO, and I don't see that as terribly plausible.

Any article making historical colonization analogies is just stupid. European colonial powers sent people to places... where people already lived. Places where people could literally live nearly naked in some cases. When the Polynesians colonized the Pacific, they went to barren places in some cases, and introduced plants, etc (this is a far better analogy than European colonization really, because it was actually more difficult), but they could still get off the boat, and you know, not instantly die.

[Bill Phil]

9 hours ago, IncongruousGoat said:

I find the Antarctica comparison not particularly compelling, for several reasons. First, Antarctica is actually worse (i.e. less habitable) than Mars by some measures. There's less available sunlight, especially during the winter months, meaning less consistently available solar power, and Earth's atmosphere is much thicker than Mars's, which corresponds to faster heat loss. 

When we start discussing the habitability of places like Mars or the Moon we inevitably reach the crux of the issue - the amount of protection required to keep a human alive. With no protection, a human on the Moon is dead in minutes. A human on Mars has a similar fate. A human in Antarctica will likely be dead in minutes as well, depending on their specific location - but not from lack of oxygen. Rather, a human will die from the cold. Thus, keeping a human alive in Antarctica is measurably easier than on Mars - no need for a pressure suit, just temperature regulation.

But even then - moderate temperatures have been recorded in Antarctica, nearly room temperature at that though those are record highs. Average coast temperature is just -10 Celsius, which is warmer than winter in Siberia and the Yukon territory. 

This is why Antarctica is more habitable than Mars - human beings can technically survive there for at least some time. We don't need a pressure suit nor an oxygen supply, just protection from the cold, to survive. At least in the short term.

You mention the lack of solar power - which is true. But solar isn't our only option. In fact, the colder environment at Antarctica can probably be useful for making heat engines more efficient than in other locations. A nuclear reactor would be a great option. And if the usability of solar power is a measure of habitability, then where I live isn't that habitable either - because it's too darn cloudy most of the time. 

Essentially the lack of solar is practically a non-issue, and the faster heat loss can be dealt with by using clothes and heating. 

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Beyond that, though, there are several international treaties preventing any and all exploitation of Antarctic resources for economic gain, by public or private entities. The population of Antarctica is low because, beyond anything else, it's illegal to do anything there other than research. Were that not the case, I'm sure we would see mining and oil towns in Antarctica, and at least one settlement that could be described as a city (to function as a port of entry, among other things). The population wouldn't be high, by any means - but it would be a lot higher than what it is today.

I doubt it. Settling Antarctica would be difficult and expensive. There are resources there, but there are also resources that aren't in Antarctica.

[tater]

Antarctica would not be "colonized" minus treaties, it would be the source of resource extraction. No one wants to move there forever, but people would happily work there for good salaries to bring home stuff like... oil.

Short of that, it would be no more colonized than extreme northern AK is (less, because it's more remote).

 

[magnemoe]

20 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Actually, I'm not sure about the cost efficiency of unmanned probes. People overestimate their capabilities and data output. Just look at how much, in terms of raw data, we got out of Apollo landings, compared to all unmanned lunar probes before or since. Automation had progressed, but so had manned research equipment. If we could set up a lab on Mars, the sheer amount of data that we'd get, pre-processed on site and transferred at a vastly higher rate than any unmanned mission could hope for, would dwarf everything we'd have learned so far. To gather that data using unmanned probes, it would require years, possibly decades of unmanned operations, and these have their costs, too, which may seem lower, but spread over such a long time, might end up totaling just as much as a manned mission. 

I agree here, probes are very limited, in that they can do and they are slow because light speed lag and power limitations. 
Now imagine an starship mission an 20 day, say an 20 man crew multiple rovers and an drilling rig for core samples. 
Then done you just load up all the stuff and return. 
Yes you probably want an separate lunar lander than the starship as that is heavy but it just reduce number of refuelings. 

[Spacescifi]

 

When I think of Mars colonization many words come to mind, but the one that screams loudest besides NO is PERCHLORATES.

Martian soil has that at levels that are considered industrial or worse.

Long story short, the dirt is toxic, the plants you grow from it will be toxic unless you can filter out the toxins, and there is no air to breath.

Matt Damon should have never survived in his Mars movie. And his plants should have been yellow, as he did not bother to dilter out the toxins. I have seen plants grown in the equavalent of martian soil. They are yellow.

So Antiartica is a lot easier to colonize, besides being close.

No sunlight? Nuclear reactors. Problem solved.

Edited April 9, 2020 by Spacescifi

[tater]

18 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Apollo is a great example, though a little unusual. It didn't only bring scientists to the Moon. It brought the Moon to scientists. Between all the Apollo missions, they've brought back about 350kg of moon rocks. Unmanned? 300 grams.

This is an absurd comparison. Had unmanned spaceccraft to the Moon been given an identical budget, they would have returned MORE downmass of lunar samples.

Apollo brought back 350kg of the Moon, along with what, 900kg of astronauts who had been on the Moon? That doesn't count the equipment required to keep 1400kg of astronauts alive for that time, or of "wasted" test flights like Apollo 10 (unmanned it could have just landed).

There is no counterfactual where the same money/effort is spent on uncrewed vehicles that does not result in more data being gathered than with humans. Yes, a geologist can do more in real time than a probe, indeed can do more in a few hours than a probe could do in many days—but sending people is orders of magnitude more expensive, and robots can function a LONG time, so the rate of gathering is not a problem.

[magnemoe]

54 minutes ago, tater said:

Antarctica would not be "colonized" minus treaties, it would be the source of resource extraction. No one wants to move there forever, but people would happily work there for good salaries to bring home stuff like... oil.

Short of that, it would be no more colonized than extreme northern AK is (less, because it's more remote).

 

This, note that 200 years ago people tended to live weirder places than we do now. Plenty of farms has been shut down as they could not be industrialized and you had fishing villages on remote islands as you had to row or sail to the fishing areas. 
Today you have fishing ships who goes from Japan to Antarctica to fish. You might get outposts just to get the economical zone for the resources but not much more. 
 

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, tater said:

This is an absurd comparison. Had unmanned spaceccraft to the Moon been given an identical budget, they would have returned MORE downmass of lunar samples.

No, they wouldn't. Have you given the thought of how to make them collect this kind of mass? Reality isn't KSP, dV is not the end of the story.  A rover wouldn't have been able to gather these rocks, especially not in 60s, when the first successful unmanned rover (Pathfinder) was 40 or so years away. Even now, how much do you think Perseverance can hold in its holder? Couldn't find any concrete data, but I doubt it's even a kilogram. Not sure how fast it goes, either, but trying to gather 100kg of rocks would mean a lot of back and forth trips, that's for sure. Again, Apollo 17 covered more ground in 4 and a half hours than Curiosity covered in seven years. The former was 60s tech, the latter 2010s tech. There are 61362 hours in seven years. That's four orders of magnitude, despite being half a century behind. Beat that.

It might be that moving around the Moon is easier, or there's less interesting stuff to do. Lunokhod 2 was faster than the Mars rovers, taking about 2688 hours to make a similar (about 4km more) distance as Apollo 17. That's still three orders of magnitude. 

9 minutes ago, tater said:

and robots can function a LONG time, so the rate of gathering is not a problem.

Yes, it is. Robots can function a long time, but they work very slowly. For all that time, you need to keep a fully staffed mission control team on station. You need to factor in these costs, too. There's a lot more to space mission costs than just the launch. Humans can get more done, faster, than anything robotic we can currently design. Even if we've had a Saturn V's payload, and were going to the moon.

Manned missions might be an order of magnitude more expensive, but as far as lunar exploration was concerned, they were 3 orders of magnitude more efficient mass-wise and 3 orders of magnitude more efficient speed-wise. As far as I'm concerned, money well spent. It's difficult to compare actual budgets because robotic sample return was USSR and manned was US, so there's a lot of differences not accounted for in there, but I don't think the US spending was 1000x that of the USSR, even considering the fact the latter wasn't very efficient about it.

[Bill Phil]

5 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Yes, it is. Robots can function a long time, but they work very slowly. For all that time, you need to keep a fully staffed mission control team on station. You need to factor in these costs, too. There's a lot more to space mission costs than just the launch. Humans can get more done, faster, than anything robotic we can currently design. Even if we've had a Saturn V's payload, and were going to the moon.

And you need hundreds of thousands of workers to get the manned mission off the ground to begin with, with another few thousand (maybe even more than ten thousand) on standby for whatever problems might crop up.

A probe on the other hand? You just need to design and build it. Then you just need to operate it and have the DSN talk to it and keep track of it - and not even that if you have autonav. Then you just need to talk to it. A small team for trajectory analysis. The rest of the team on the ground would be scientists. Maybe a few hundred for a big mission like Cassini.

[Dirkidirk]

51 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

When I think of Mars colonization many words come to mind, but the one that screams loudest besides NO is PERCHLORATES.

Martian soil has that at levels that are considered industrial or worse.

Long story short, the dirt is toxic, the plants you grow from it will be toxic unless you can filter out the toxins, and there is no air to breath.

Matt Damon should have never survived in his Mars movie. And his plants should have been yellow, as he did not bother to dilter out the toxins. I have seen plants grown in the equavalent of martian soil. They are yellow.

last time I checked (most of) antarctica doesn't even have dirt.

1 hour ago, Spacescifi said:

So Antiartica is a lot easier to colonize, besides being close.

yes

[tater]

30 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

No, they wouldn't. Have you given the thought of how to make them collect this kind of mass? Reality isn't KSP, dV is not the end of the story.  A rover wouldn't have been able to gather these rocks, especially not in 60s, when the first successful unmanned rover (Pathfinder) was 40 or so years away. Even now, how much do you think Perseverance can hold in its holder? Couldn't find any concrete data, but I doubt it's even a kilogram. Not sure how fast it goes, either, but trying to gather 100kg of rocks would mean a lot of back and forth trips, that's for sure. Again, Apollo 17 covered more ground in 4 and a half hours than Curiosity covered in seven years. The former was 60s tech, the latter 2010s tech. There are 61362 hours in seven years. That's four orders of magnitude, despite being half a century behind. Beat that.

MONEY.

Curiosity cost ~3B$ in today's money, Apollo cost about 150 B in constant dollars (closer to 500B if you count all NASA space from the goal setting forward). You are also comparing the Moon to Mars. Rovers have to go really slow because of comm lags. This is simply not true for the Moon, a rover could go faster.

Also, they didn't bother to make uncrewed rovers for the Moon, because they knew they had humans. Different goals, different R&D.

For a robot mission, you probably do direct ascent. Loading rocks? Yeah, you need a teleoperated unit to collect them. A smaller rover (like the one sent, but smaller), and a scoop. It would not have been insurmountable in the 60s, and as time has progressed, the ability of robots continuously increases, whereas the ability of humans is exactly the same. yeah, humans are faster, but going to Mars is a multi-hundred billion dollar trip. When SpaceX gets SS running, then they test it on mars, then if they get a crew version... I'm open to humans instead. If the exploration is done any NASA way, probes are better, full stop.

 

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It might be that moving around the Moon is easier, or there's less interesting stuff to do. Lunokhod 2 was faster than the Mars rovers, taking about 2688 hours to make a similar (about 4km more) distance as Apollo 17. That's still three orders of magnitude. 

We put literally zero effort into this. The Russians put more, but then again they put a lot of effort into the N1, and how did that turn out relative to Apollo? I suspect that NASA doing rover based sample return instead of astronauts with the same effort would have been more successful by about the same margin of Apollo vs the N1 program.

 

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Yes, it is. Robots can function a long time, but they work very slowly. For all that time, you need to keep a fully staffed mission control team on station. You need to factor in these costs, too. There's a lot more to space mission costs than just the launch. Humans can get more done, faster, than anything robotic we can currently design. Even if we've had a Saturn V's payload, and were going to the moon.

More done faster doesn't matter, all that matters is money.

Which returns more data per unit dollar? Nothing else matters.

EDIT: how much sample return is actually needed? The best scientific return might have been to get 1kg from 350 far flung locations, rather than 350kg from areas around 6 landing sites. Maybe just as much return on 100g from that many locations, I have no idea. Robots can also land places we'd not risk humans.

 

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Manned missions might be an order of magnitude more expensive, but as far as lunar exploration was concerned, they were 3 orders of magnitude more efficient mass-wise and 3 orders of magnitude more efficient speed-wise. As far as I'm concerned, money well spent. It's difficult to compare actual budgets because robotic sample return was USSR and manned was US, so there's a lot of differences not accounted for in there, but I don't think the US spending was 1000x that of the USSR, even considering the fact the latter wasn't very efficient about it.

2 orders of magnitude more expensive. They were not 3 orders of magnitude more efficient, or faster.

The US effort for human lunar spaceflight was literally infinitely more efficient, because it actually worked.

Edited April 9, 2020 by tater

[tater]

ADDENDUM:

To be clear, I am all for human exploration of the Moon and Mars (past and future)—but I think it is desirable just because it is inspirational, not because I need to somehow show it is more cost effective, that's a losing battle, because it's not.

 

[Guest]

"Inspirational" causes are losing battles. For governments to fork over money, you need something more than inspirational. Again, if you want to do serious science, you need humans. By the time you design a rover with all the capabilities of trained chemists, geologists and, most importantly, a pair of human hands, then sending a crew will turn out to be actually simpler. You can't make a Mars rover move fast, because the human operators need to react. Whatever Rube Goldberg contraption you devise for sample collection will be less flexible and more likely to fail than a human in a spacesuit. Whatever canned experiments you send, there'll always be one that you wish you had included, but didn't. These problems are much reduced with a human crew, especially when given a proper research outpost.

Simpler=cheaper in this case. Despite its limitations, human body and mind surpasses anything we've created so far when it comes to flexibility and maneuverability. Ultimately, for all their robustness, robots are fragile, dumb as bricks and limited in what they can do. The rovers we sent, despite having a smaller budget than Apollo, were pretty much the peak of robotic technology at the time of their launch. Some things you can't bypass by shoveling money onto them, and this is one such thing. 

2 hours ago, tater said:

More done faster doesn't matter, all that matters is money.

Which returns more data per unit dollar? Nothing else matters.

Humans, by the virtue of sheer amount of quality data they can generate. And don't count by raw gigabytes, because it skews the picture towards, well, pictures. Don't ignore the cost of maintaining a support team for over a decade or so, either, if you compare costs up to launch only, you'd be missing a big chunk. Also, a robotic probe will, by necessity, have all its experiment design done before launch, and set in stone afterwards, meaning that it can't design experiments in-situ, necessitating a follow-up launch (...more rockets, another decade of supporting another rover...). Just wait until a human crew gets on Mars, it'll likely do more than all the rovers and landers up to that point combined. Including things that weren't even attempted because there was no way to get the relevant experiment on a rover.

2 hours ago, tater said:

EDIT: how much sample return is actually needed? The best scientific return might have been to get 1kg from 350 far flung locations, rather than 350kg from areas around 6 landing sites. Maybe just as much return on 100g from that many locations, I have no idea. Robots can also land places we'd not risk humans.

Another reason to send humans, actually. Most of Apollo sample collecting was done by a rover, the last one across a distance exceeded only by two rovers, ever (Opportunity and Lunokhod 2). They collected samples from all over the place, as opposed to every robotic sample return so far. And no, a robot, when faced with terrain that would give a human a pause, would flip over before even getting near. Walking, as a mode of locomotion, is actually pretty great at handling very though terrain, but also ridiculously difficult. Really, humans are capable of calculating every individual step, in real time, based only on data from their eyes and their sense of balance. It's something that even room-sized supercomputers can't manage. Space mountaineering might be risky, but with more advanced space suits (Apollo ones were rather primitive), it's very much possible. Humans, being descended from apes, are actually fairly good at climbing. 

[tater]

38 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

"Inspirational" causes are losing battles. For governments to fork over money, you need something more than inspirational. Again, if you want to do serious science, you need humans.

Abject nonsense. Inspiration is literally the only reason we have any human spaceflight program at all. Apollo was never about science, that was a happy side effect, it was a PR battle in the Cold War. ISS doesn't do any useful science except in the area of keeping humans alive in microgravity that could not be done without the people (people harm most science on ISS, because they make the thing vibrate), for example. Why have it? It ain't there because of "science."

 

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By the time you design a rover with all the capabilities of trained chemists, geologists and, most importantly, a pair of human hands, then sending a crew will turn out to be actually simpler. You can't make a Mars rover move fast, because the human operators need to react. Whatever Rube Goldberg contraption you devise for sample collection will be less flexible and more likely to fail than a human in a spacesuit. Whatever canned experiments you send, there'll always be one that you wish you had included, but didn't. These problems are much reduced with a human crew, especially when given a proper research outpost.

That's why all the scientists currently on Mars are doing so much work compared to all those old rovers we used to send... oh, wait, NASA doesn't have the budget to even seriously think about Mars for humans, much less have already sent them.

Robots get better month by month, and as launch costs become better, the ability to spam more, and less expensive robots improves. When the rover is 10 years old by the time it launches... not ideal.

 

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Simpler=cheaper in this case. Despite its limitations, human body and mind surpasses anything we've created so far when it comes to flexibility and maneuverability. Ultimately, for all their robustness, robots are fragile, dumb as bricks and limited in what they can do. The rovers we sent, despite having a smaller budget than Apollo, were pretty much the peak of robotic technology at the time of their launch. Some things you can't bypass by shoveling money onto them, and this is one such thing. 

You need strip mining excavators to scoop the money to do human exploration compared to robotic. Shovel money for robots, or strip miner excavators of money for humans.

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Humans, by the virtue of sheer amount of quality data they can generate. And don't count by raw gigabytes, because it skews the picture towards, well, pictures. Don't ignore the cost of maintaining a support team for over a decade or so, either, if you compare costs up to launch only, you'd be missing a big chunk. Also, a robotic probe will, by necessity, have all its experiment design done before launch, and set in stone afterwards, meaning that it can't design experiments in-situ, necessitating a follow-up launch (...more rockets, another decade of supporting another rover...). Just wait until a human crew gets on Mars, it'll likely do more than all the rovers and landers up to that point combined. Including things that weren't even attempted because there was no way to get the relevant experiment on a rover.

Tell me the cost of a plausible Mars mission (not just plausible technically, which is hard enough, but one that could be funded without changing the NASA budget at all, or the politics of said budget), and then compare the expected scientific return to the same money spent on robots. Has to launch in some reasonable time frame, say 4 years? Too short? 8 years? Go.

(Starship off the table, I've already stipulated that if SpaceX can manage ridiculously cheap human Moon/Mars travel, sure, why not)

 

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Another reason to send humans, actually. Most of Apollo sample collecting was done by a rover, the last one across a distance exceeded only by two rovers, ever (Opportunity and Lunokhod 2). They collected samples from all over the place, as opposed to every robotic sample return so far. And no, a robot, when faced with terrain that would give a human a pause, would flip over before even getting near. Walking, as a mode of locomotion, is actually pretty great at handling very though terrain, but also ridiculously difficult. Really, humans are capable of calculating every individual step, in real time, based only on data from their eyes and their sense of balance. It's something that even room-sized supercomputers can't manage. Space mountaineering might be risky, but with more advanced space suits (Apollo ones were rather primitive), it's very much possible. Humans, being descended from apes, are actually fairly good at climbing. 

The geologist on that mission was the guy I learned lunar geology from. Was always funny to have Jack say, "Next slide" then a pic of an astronaut next to a rock appears and he says, "That's me, next to (whatever the rock was, then goes into some details about it). Next slide."

Lunar robots can be teleoperated in nearly real time, and they can self-drive for the intervening 2.5 seconds perfectly well. On the one hand the prospect of humans back to the Moon is actually not that far fetched in the next 8 years or so, but the counterfactual that all the money AL is pushing for for SLS/Orion/Artemis would be instead spent with the goal of generating scientific data on the Moon, and we get way more bang for the buck with robots, since the current lunar program is designed to do things to spend money, vs spending money to do things.

 

Edited April 9, 2020 by tater

[Superfluous J]

18 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

People fly by planes because have you ever tried driving from New York to London?

Plus, it's way faster.

Those are two reasons, but as someone who regularly flies about 1000 miles over very driveable land, the PRIMARY reason I fly is that it's cheaper. Driving solo is over 2x the cost of flying. You need 3 people to make it cost effective.

Time is a factor, but I consider (open road) driving time a plus

Edited April 9, 2020 by Superfluous J

[mikegarrison]

19 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

Those are two reasons, but as someone who regularly flies about 1000 miles over very driveable land, the PRIMARY reason I fly is that it's cheaper. Driving solo is over 2x the cost of flying. You need 3 people to make it cost effective.

This is mainly because commercial air travel is mass transit. So many people seem to forget that.

[Superfluous J]

4 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

This is mainly because commercial air travel is mass transit. So many people seem to forget that.

I am not among them.

It's the primary reason I personally prefer driving even though I don't do it any more.

It's also why I won't take a train. The cost and time of a car ride with the sardine-can feel of a plane. No thanks!

Edited April 9, 2020 by Superfluous J

[DDE]

10 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

A probe on the other hand? You just need to design and build it.

I think you underestimate the logistics chain of the booster, the payload and the DSN. The savings are there, but, especially for Moon probes vs Moon ships, they aren't as overwhelming.

The only big obstacle is the need for a much larger launch vehicle.

[Guest]

14 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

And you need hundreds of thousands of workers to get the manned mission off the ground to begin with, with another few thousand (maybe even more than ten thousand) on standby for whatever problems might crop up.

Just like for a probe. Any launch takes hundreds of thousands of workers, both before and after, . Even a lousy commsat has a months long launch campaign associated with it. Look up JWST for an example, it's been years since they "just designed built the payload", and the rockets for it are quite available. They still haven't launched the thing. There's been quite a bit more work involved than just "design and launch". RL is not KSP.

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A probe on the other hand? You just need to design and build it. Then you just need to operate it and have the DSN talk to it and keep track of it - and not even that if you have autonav. Then you just need to talk to it. A small team for trajectory analysis. The rest of the team on the ground would be scientists. Maybe a few hundred for a big mission like Cassini.

No, you need the exact same few thousand on standby, because a probe is a complex things that can break, and you don't want to lose it. In addition to a relatively small 24/7 team, you need to keep a team of experts around to solve any problems the prove might have in transit and after landing. For a decade or more. See the problem?

Astronauts actually need less babysitting than a probe does, though due to more complex nature of manned missions (which is partially because astronauts are so capable), a larger support team is a good idea. It's more to make sure they aren't wasting their time, though. Not to mention, they'd be home in a year and a half, or so. 

3 hours ago, DDE said:

I think you underestimate the logistics chain of the booster, the payload and the DSN. The savings are there, but, especially for Moon probes vs Moon ships, they aren't as overwhelming.

The only big obstacle is the need for a much larger launch vehicle.

What I've been trying to say all along. There's so much more to launching a mission, manned or unmanned, than just the LV and payload. That's one thing KSP doesn't teach. People just don't seem to realize how much work goes into an average rocket launch.

[kerbiloid]

Afaik, the accessible Martian water is mostly contained by polar caps (though it's also scattered in equatorial craters).

The Martian tilt is nearly the same (25°), so the insolation is probably similar on both Mars and Antarctica in sense of polar night.
And twice worse on Mars during the polar daytime due to the distance.
Also, the Martian polar night lasts twice longer.

***

Since the semiconductors got high, the main purpose of the human spaceflights is not "inspirational", but "showing off".

Edited April 10, 2020 by kerbiloid

[magnemoe]

17 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

This is mainly because commercial air travel is mass transit. So many people seem to forget that.

Yes, but 1000 miles take quite some time to drive, drove 1000 km plenty of times and was pretty worn out, granted that was not highway more than 200 but you take all of an day driving 1600 km. An flight take you less than 6 including travel to and from airport and all the check in and most of the time is just waiting. Benefit of driving is that you have an car at destination. Rental cars is expensive 
Short flights is not much of an issue as they are just 1-2 hour stays, transatlantic is worse except once then I got an 3 seat row for my self, ate the food, tilted over and fell asleep, woke up over Canada
I can not sleep sitting unless dead drunk or in the same state because lack of sleep. 

[tater]

The idea that somehow human space missions require fewer ground support staff overhead because astronauts are capable is comical.

For a NASA Mars mission there will literally be a full mission control team operating 24/7 for the entire duration of the mission. In Shifts, obviously. Each shift larger than any rover, ever. ISS mission control is 3 shifts of 50 a day (so 150 unique employees, every day). That's just mission control, there are regular engineers supporting ISS as well. Dunno what the numbers are for the Russian side. Can't find the data for current control staff for Curiosity, but it's certainly far, far smaller.