The Planetary Society Does Not Want "The Martian" To Happen
Keith’s note: “The Martian” is doing very well in theaters. Reviews are strong, space advocates love it, and the media has been putting forth some long, often thoughtful, discussions about the value of human exploration and NASA’s ability to work with a prominent film to get that message out. That’s human exploration by the way – as in humans going to places to explore. But at the Planetary Society, there is ongoing doubt about this exploration paradigm.
Last week senior Planetary Society staffer Emily Lakdawalla referred to humans on Mars as “filthy meatbag bodies” in response to her organization’s report on their preferred mission to Mars where humans would be held at bay for years and maybe land on the surface 25 years from now. Maybe. And they have to kill the ISS to make that plan happen.
As I noted last week, it is quite obvious that the Planetary Society would be happy if it took longer to put humans on Mars than NASA and others would like it to take since “Filthy meatbag bodies” don’t belong on Mars – if at all possible. An additional tweet from Lakdawalla tonight, coupled with one last year (there have been others) shows that Planetary Society staff are openly hostile to the notion of humans on Mars – or anywhere else in space. These anti-human spaceflight tweets are never deleted. The Planetary Society never disputes or disavows them. The Planetary Society prefers robots to humans – period.
Meanwhile, if you visit the National Space Society’s webpage or Twitter feed @nss you will see no mention whatsoever of this space movie with blockbuster potential. How sad. They were once such a forceful advocate for a balanced program of human and robotic exploration of space. A once prominent space advocacy organization is now a corpse that can’t even go through the motions of being relevant.
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– Planetary Society Does Not Want Humans on Mars, Earlier post
– Planetary Society is Both For and Against Human Spaceflight, Earlier post
– Planetary Society’s Mars Mission Takes Longer To Do Less, Earlier post
– Not Everyone Wants To Be The Martian, Earlier post
Someone should start an official non-profit SpaceX cheerleading team. More space advocacy energy than the usual suspects ever had.
Sounds like Kim Stanley Robinson would sort the Planetary Society into Ann Clayborne’s “Red” movement. It’s one side of a valid argument. The National Space Society should take extra scrutiny if they are not participating in this at all.
Robot explorers do great science, but they can do better science when they can be hands-on upgraded, like Hubble, when they need to answer new questions. Also, a rover that doesn’t have to rule out the repairman to fix wheel damage, or pull it out of the sand, can be built far less expensively used far more aggressively.
Except that having a nearby repair shop cancels the cost savings of cheaper, less redundant, and upgradable robots.
It’s like with the Hubble missions. It’s good that they were able to repair it, but how much did the repair missions cost versus just building a couple copies of it and launching a new one up when the old one breaks down?
Granted, no one seems to think that way, so it’s good that they did the repair missions. But it’s something to consider.
They repaired and upgraded it with Shuttle missions and they launched it with a Shuttle mission, so that expense was a constant. Hubble was difficult to get approved as it was, so if they’d downsized it to launch it on an expendible launcher, Congress might not have finished funding it. They have to get their slice of the pie. A new Hubbles might not have been approved. I’ll bet that if NASA were to upsize JWST or its successor, to require SLS to launch it, Congress would slobber all over it right now.
That makes sense. I didn’t think about the “find a mission for the Shuttle” factor.
The repair missions provided amazing displays of astonaut capabiities that were valuable in themselves, but simply building additional copies of the original telescope and launching them on ELVs would have been less expensive. That said, the Webb is not servicable or replaceable and because of that it incurrs additonal costs (for more extensive testing and verification) and risks, A program to manufacture a series of telescopes, evolving in capabilities and replacing earlier versions as they wear out (as with GPS weather and communicaitons satellites) might be more sustainable.
In this case your still paying for the repair shop, except that it is in orbit, out of reach of the robots…which was kind of my point.
The human race is more interested in humans walking on Mars than in finding dead bugs on Mars. Looking for nonexistant life on Mars has never popularized or will popularize the need to go to Mars. We go to Mars to explore and extend man’s presence in space. The Planetary Society needs to realize that!
They do. I watched a Planetary Society chat meet on youtube where Lakdawalla said that while she personally isn’t in any hurry to see human beings go anywhere in space, she recognizes that this is much more important to other potential supporters of space exploration – especially younger ones.
If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have come up with this proposal for a gradual approach with Orbit-First.
In what parallel Universe doesn’t The Planetary Society Want “The Martian” To Happen?
The reason to send robots vs people is the orders of magnitude cost reduction. To look at it another way, for a fixed cost you could have an order of magnitude more robotic missions. Compare the costs of the space station and shuttle programs to NASA’s unmanned mission as an example.
Yep. It’s unlikely that NASA would get to keep its existing funding level if they phased out crewed missions entirely, but if they could then they could fund a ton of new robotic missions with the $8 billion/year that goes towards the crewed spaceflight part of the budget.
$8 billion/year gets you dozens of additional Discovery Program-level missions. Or a Flagship-class mission to every single planet in the solar system*, including a true Jupiter Icy Moons mission complete with Europa orbiter and lander. Or some amazing new telescopes, the kind that could potentially directly image earth-sized exoplanets to determine their atmospheres. The amount of potential scientific research that could be done with that funding in space is just staggering.
* Not that you necessarily would do that – Mercury probably doesn’t need one, and Venus only needs one if you decide you want to do a dedicated long-term lander on the surface. But it would be possible.
I think NASA overestimates the additional excitement garnered by human spaceflight. I think the net public interest would be greater with many more missions rather than a few human spaceflight missions.
Agreed.
Disagree
Humans on Mars and beyond
by
HB Paksoy, DPhil
https://www.academia.edu/14…
The Planetary Society has never wanted humans in space (let alone Mars) and I doubt they ever will with the current leadership. Maybe in 25 years a new leadership team will support humans, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
The Planetary Society has a site dedicated to humans to Mars.
http://hom.planetary.org/
So I wouldn’t say ‘The Planetary Society has never wanted humans in space’ is an adequate description.
There is a difference between what they say and what they do.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
I took Lakdawalla’s “meatbag” comment as sardonic and responded in kind. (The interwebz have even more trouble recognizing sardonic than they do sarcasm.)
But I’m still puzzled why TPS would be down on exploration by manned/crewed/human missions. (Yes, they’re squabbling to find the politically correct term for that, too.)
Just another sign of the total politicization of everything today. Maybe we should all stay home.
It’s a legitimate argument. If you don’t believe in space colonies in any near time frame, and want to get the maximum dollar value for the space science funding you can get, you go with the robots instead of crewed exploration. Crewed exploration is high reward, but also very high expense and high risk. If the Planetary Society wanted to outright say that crewed exploration is a waste of money that could be more productively spent on robotic missions, they’d be well in their rights to say so.
As for Lakdawalla, she’s right. As it stands right now, a crewed landing mission to Mars would almost certainly bring biological contamination with Earth life beyond the COSPAR guidelines. That’s bad, because probably the biggest reason why Mars is getting a disproportionately high amount of space science resources directed at it is because of the possibility of ancient and extant life – it does us no good if we then promptly screw that up and make it almost impossible to tell whether any life we find later on is indigenous or imported.
But again what is the big importance of finding life on Mars. We are life here and we should be able to go there and live.
Scientific curiosity about the universe?
If you’re not interested in that, it’s fine. But we still have the question of whether the federal government should fund it, and exactly what type of operations it should fund after choosing to do so. I don’t think the federal government should be funding space colonies, although I want them funding scientific research.
Indeed. It’s like the Prime Directive at the microbial level.
If we are going to wait until we can land humans on Mars with no contamination, we’ll wait forever. You can land filthy humans and contaminate a tiny region on Mars and send clean teleoperated probes to the remaining 99.9% of the planet.
What if a private concern gets the billions to land and start a colony? Can anyone stop them on COSPAR guidelines?
Yes, easily. I believe the COSPAR rules have the status of an international treaty. A private company violating it could be fined by a signatory country, have assets seized if they don’t pay, etc. It’s more-or-less the same thing that would happen to a private company trying to make money drilling for oil in Antarctic.
She officially represents the Planetary Society. Her comments are not revised or deleted so either the organization does not know what she is saying in an official capacity or they agree with what she says.
Aren’t a number of former astronauts members of the Planetary Society? I know Tom Jones was or still is.
All due respect to Dr. Lakdawalla as a scientist, she simply does not ‘get it’ in terms of human beings, and specifically why humans explore Space. Its not just about ‘doing science’. Its about the human journey of exploration which has been underway now since early humans first stepped out of their caves in Central Africa and decided to see what was in the next valley. Going to Mars is going to be one more step along that road, and it should not stop at Mars. I think humans – and robots – working together, side by side, should expand across our Solar System, explore, colonise, do science, use space resources, and open up new frontiers for humanity’s next steps. The journey never stops Dr. Lakdawalla, and if it does then we stagnate as a species and a civilisation. Sure, we can sit here on Earth and send machines out to explore the cosmos, but that is not as meaningful as humans going. Humans want to go – ask anyone on this website why they got into Space as a child in the Apollo era, and I doubt many would say because it was about sending robots. I got into Space because I wanted to go – the ‘Blue Danube’ segment of ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’ showed me a future I wanted to be in, just as ‘The Martian’ has shown a future for humans on Mars that is very positive. Those two visions, and everything about humanity exploring and expanding into Space is very positive – for the average person, far more so than sitting in your living room watching the latest pics from a probe on the nightly news.
HUMANS ON MARS AND BEYOND
BY
HB paksoy, DPhil
http://www.academia.edu/146…
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