- Original Message -
From: Reggie Bautista [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2003 2:44 PM
Subject: Re: Chinese manned space flight (Spoilers for At the Core by
Larry Niven
Dan wrote:
So, to get back to Damon's comments, let me ask a question. Why should
a
PR victory for a communist dictatorship elicit all that much interest?
Because now there is another major player, a potential rival of our
country,
that is capable of independently putting a human being in space. If they
can put a human in space, they can build their own space station (which
I believe is a stated goal of theirs), they can eventually lauch their
own
manned Mars mission if they choose to, and they could eventually become
the world leader in terms of space exploration. How likely those things
are
to happen are open to much debate. But the potential is there, and
therefore this event is newsworthy; maybe not front-page, dominating
all news kind of newsworthy, but certainly worthy of being reported and
noticed.
The potential has been there ever since they had launch capacity. Putting
one person into orbit does require a certain level of sophistication, but
we did achieve it 40 years ago. There is no doubt that France, Germany,
the UK all have the potential to put a person into orbit rather quickly.
Their declining to do so relates to their relative security in terms of
national self image, IMHO.
I think that Damon's point on an emerging self identity is valid, and that
we do need to watch for it. However, I think that non-destructive
demonstrations of national pride are more to be encouraged than worried
about. The best part of the space program in the '60s is that it was a way
of showing who had the best missle technology without hurting anyone.
As to the issue of whether having a human presence is space at all is
important... just having a presence in orbit is an advantage because
there
are things at this point that we don't even know that we don't know.
Without continuing to have people travelling into space on a regular
basis, we have no idea what kinds of new information we won't have
access to.
This relates to a question that I've often seen on sci.physics
aren't scientists supposed to be open to all possibilities?
I can understand the framework in which that seems valid. How can someone
be a good scientist if they don't look into all possibilities? The problem
with that logic is that there are an infinity of possibilities and finite
resources to explore them. One needs to pick and chose the best possible
candidates.
And, manned spaceflight falls rather low on the bang for the buck list.
You cite the one example during the last 30 years where having a manned
mission was a real plus for science. I'll adress that singular example
below.
Compare the advancements in science that have come from experiments run by
humans in space to those achieved without humans present. I'd argue that
there are orders of magnitude of difference between what we've accomplished
by machines working on their own vs. what we've accomplished by having
humans in orbit working. Yet, the cost of the humans working has been
higher than the cost of the unmanned programs.
And there have been (and will probably continue to be) practical
scientific benefits. FREX, without a manned space program, the Hubble
project would have been a bust; remember, it took a manned repair
mission to fix some problems with Hubble that weren't discovered
until it was already in orbit.
That is the one example that people continue to refer to. So, I'd argue
that one could ask how cost effective a solution this is? How many months
of shuttle operation would pay for the difference in cost between building
and sending a second Hubble telecope and the cost of repairing the Hubble,
as we did? (From the figure's I've seen, its less than 6 months.)
Dan M.
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