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Mars: For anyone interested in the Perseverance touch down

That's a lot of tonnage to send to Mars orbit, just to create an extremely risky and extremly sub-optimal work environment with very low comm lag. By far the cheapest, safest, most optimal work environment for the human component of the mission is right here on earth. How badly do you need to bring down that comm lag? How much risk to human life is it actually worth? How many billions of dollars is it worth, to mitigate that risk to an acceptable level? Would it be a better use of those billions and billions, to just develop and send better robots?

Maybe. But it's nowhere near as cool.
 
Personally I think being serious about doing safe and cost-effective science is cool, and sending humans "because it's cool" isn't cool at all, but rather stupid and wasteful.


Cool sells.

Sadly, sensible and cost effective just isn't as saleable.
 
Cool sells.

Sadly, sensible and cost effective just isn't as saleable.

I dunno. People seem pretty excited about these uncrewed missions to Mars lately.

And I think there might be some equivocation here. Are you personally less interested in safer, more cost-effective missions because you personally consider them "uncool"?

Or do you prefer such missions, and lament the alleged necessity of making space exploration "cooler" by sending humans?
 
The point about the robots getting better seems to me to be a particularly important one. At some point the communications lag should matter much less as these robots become more autonomous. And there is a lot of money and talent these days going into the development of autonomy (the obvious example is in self-driving cars, but there are other examples). Many of the advances in those technologies will likely be applicable to space-exploration as well.

Of course, things may be advancing slower than some have hoped, and we won't have fully autonomous Mars rovers launching tomorrow. But building an infrastructure for manned exploration is also not something that can be done overnight. If we expect major gains from manned exploration because humans are better explorers than robots, or because communication lag extremely limiting, we might find those gains evaporate by the time a manned program can actually land people on Mars, or put them in orbit to control robots on the surface.

(Even if those gains actually exist, which, as theprestige notes, may not be the case)

I'm still less opposed to manned space exploration than this sounds. For instance I'm hopeful that we can get a robust space-tourism industry. An Apollo 8 style trip around the moon sounds pretty awesome. And if that includes at some point Elon's vision of sending paying passengers to Mars to set up shop there, great, though it's pretty hard to see how the economics can be made to work, at least any time soon. But as for prestige missions of just landing humans on Mars for the sake of going there... I don't know. It sounds like a cool thing to do, but if we're choosing between that and sending fifty rovers, I'll choose the rovers. Hell, I'd rather we send some telescopes to the solar gravitational lens than land humans on Mars.
 
My view is that we're always interested in robots that can better handle ambiguous situations. Whether it's how to pick up a rock, or how to survey a planet. So the claim that we must move heaven and earth to put humans at risk, in order to handle ambiguous situations, gets weaker and weaker every day.

A human could have picked up that rock easily? Guess what? Sending a human to pick up that rock is just not worth the effort. Sending a robot that can do real science at an infinitesimal fraction of the cost, and maybe pick up the rock while it's there, is way cooler.
 
Everywhere needs castles.

Yup.


I like the idea of interviewing someone and the following conversation results...

"I see you have listed programming and piloting remote controlled autonomous helicopters as one of your skills..."

"Yeah, it feels silly to have that one on there, but in my defence...

... the helicopter was on Mars."
 
Well, you see, we don't just want to pick up the rock. We want to do stuff with it too.

Who's we, what's the stuff, and how badly does whoever want it done?

Put a number on it. How many human lives are you willing to put at risk - huge risk, huger than even sending people to Antarctica, or the Marianas trench - just to do some stuff to Mars rocks?

Put a number on it. How many billions of dollars is it worth to you, to put humans on Mars for a fraction of the safety margin they'd have here on earth, doing geology in Antarctica? For that many billions, you could probably sent an automated lab that could do the same thing without putting any lives at risk at all. Why is that not better?

Put a number on it. How soon, in years, do you want this done? Should we accept greater safety risks and lesser capabilities to get it done sooner? How much sooner?
 
People, and air, and food, and safety systems, and radiation shielding, and exercise equipment, and whatever a human might need, to not go insane after a year or two.... All that payload tonnage could give you a lot of robots and no risk at all to human life.

And the robots will keep getting better and better.
But who is going to pay for that? My point was that manned exploration will lead to more robots being sent to Mars to prepare for the arrival of people and to assist people while they are there. And the robots will be more effective because they will eventually be controlled by people that don't have to work around a long transmission delay.

If the funding for manned missions disappears, it is likely that funding for unmanned missions will be cut even more dramatically as public interest in Mars exploration abates.

There are other benefits of manned exploration including inspiring young people to become interested in science and engineering building a larger base of scientists and engineers - directly and indirectly advancing technology and medicine.
 
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If the funding for manned missions disappears, it is likely that funding for unmanned missions will be cut even more dramatically as public interest in Mars exploration abates.

All Mars exploration up to now has been robotic, but funding has remained. I don't think funding for the exploration of Mars is dependent upon a manned Mars program, which has never existed.
 
All 4 rotors were damaged...
... mission managers revealed that all four of Ingenuity's blades were damaged during a rough landing on the Red Planet surface.

Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity Project Manager, said that NASA and JPL still aren't sure what caused the damage to Ingenuity's blades; it remains unclear whether the helicopter's power dipped during landing, causing unwanted ground contact, or if it accidentally struck the ground to cause a "brownout."

Tzanetos added that NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will slowly rotate the helicopter's blades and "wiggle" them, or adjust their angle, while collecting video in order to allow the team to determine the extent of Ingenuity's damage.

I'm guessing the video will be of the blades' shadows to determine the damage? Can't imagine how else they would image them.
 

Around 25 seconds in there's a cool map that shows all of flights of the helicopter and how far it got from where it started out. 71 successful flights and one that ended not so well. But that's still pretty darn good.
 
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