NASA's Solution To Operating A Human Facility Like Gateway: Droids.
NAC member asks about 60-90 day/yr visits to Gateway. Gerst's answer is to add AI to let robots do things. That's the solution: robots operating a human-capable facility that replicates the ISS in many ways because they do not have the budget to send crews to operate the Gateway. pic.twitter.com/lw82mHLAFj
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) December 10, 2018
Nothing wrong with a robotic gateway. Except theres no need for any of the components to be as big as to fit on heavy lift vehicle only, either
I, for one, wish to be among the first to welcome our space-faring AI overlords. Just sayin’…
I guess the LOPG bot can tweet pictures of floating junk. #JourneyToMars #JourneyToNowhere
If they’re not sending crews for 30-90 day stays, then the Gateway literally has no value as a human outpost. If nothing else, it would have provided some useful data on the impact of radiation on human health outside of Earth’s magnetosphere.
Why would you send humans for that anyway ? We still got lab mice
Could we come with something better than using astronauts as test subjects for medical research? Or, if we’re going to, stop worrying so much about launch safety? If the goal is to see what radiation does to them, we clearly all that concerned about protecting their health.
Don’t get me wrong – I wouldn’t support the Gateway just to get that data, and I don’t support it now. I was just making a point that such data was literally the only thing of value I could think of the Gateway providing (even unwittingly), and without that it has no point at all. It’s just a tollbooth on the way to the lunar surface, one that will siphon off funds from any other crewed missions beyond Low Earth Orbit.
There is almost no point to the gateway facility, except to “make work.” What a waste of time. It must be nice to just spend money. Looks like nothing more than a jobs program.
Besides humans exposure to radiation outside of earth’s protection what are they learning on gateway? They bring all the food, water, air with them for each 30-90 mission so not testing closed loop systems. Testing a Gerty or another robonaut could be done on the ISS. Maybe if they incentivized commercial partners to provide crew flights they could go more often than the $2B once a year SLS/Orion mission.
Ah, they’re going to apply all the lessons and experience they learned about using R2 on the ISS. You know, those things they did with it.
Glad we can just buy an astromech droid from the Jawa traders. Be a shame if we had to develop one.
I guess we’ll call it an almost human spaceflight program!
You know a lot of us with long time NASA experience lost faith in human space flight management decades ago. We had Space Station Management installed in the 1990s who possessed absolutely zero experience or expertise even though there was plenty of expertise available from other programs. Then we had the unnecessary waste of a Shuttle crew. Then we had the nonsensical, expensive and unsupportable Apollo on steroids while simultaneously shutting down the functioning program of record, Shuttle; and now we have a nonsensical Gateway. Someone has to put an end to the nonsensical waste of time and money. I don’t know where they will find people who can lead any new effort; they have operated for so long without leadership I do not think there is any left in the US within NASA.
From around 1960 I remember a serious debate. The US was making capable robotic probes. The USSR was behind us in robotic systems but they had spacecraft large enough to carry people. Which was better?
To be perfectly realistic, human capabilities were much greater than robotics in 1960, but robotic capabilities continue to advance while human capabilities have not changed much in the last 100,000 years.
In just the last few years electronic systems have finally begun to approach the trillion-synapse complexity of the human brain. There is simply no objective evidence that AI faces any fundamental barrier to achieving self-awareness.
Whether humans will reach Mars in our lifetime depends mainly on your definition of “human”.
The ISS also had a robotic system associated with it, the Flight Telerobotic Servicer (FTS). It never flew.
This is particularly ironic because one of the selling points of the DSG is that it can serve as a platform for operating robots on the surface of the Moon with less time lag than from Earth. Well, operating the DSG with robots involves dealing with more or less the same time lag a robot on the surface of the Moon would experience. So why not cut out the middleman?