Slate online magazine -- It's the Earth, Stupid By Gregg EasterbrookI used to want to be an astronaut, until I realized that heights scare the p-suit pants off me. I guess it's easy for me to say that I agree with Easterbrook's thesis in this article. However, I really do think we need to focus much, much more on unmanned space exploration until we get a better means of travel to orbit than huge wasteful Big Dumb Boosters (BDBs) or "reusable" launch vehicles that cost more to "re-use" than it would cost to build a new BDB for each launch.
Pro-manned space flight folks like to talk about how the space program has paid for itself several times over by virtue of the new technologies it created. That's true, but it kind of ignores the fact that many of those breakthroughs happened because of the limitations imposed by our rocket technology. For example, printed circuits and integrated circuits came about because we didn't have unlimited thrust to shoot hand-wired circuits built with discrete transistors, resistors, etc. Similarly, if NASA could have sent a human doctor on each flight, there would have been no need to develop the medical telemetry that has been heralded as another space program spinoff.
In fact, the Soviets had better BDBs than the Americans -- apparently, we got Wernher von Braun
(" 'Vunce ze rockets go up, who cares vere zey come down? Dot's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun"), they got the best of the rest of the German rocket engineers after WWII. What was the result? Crappy, crappy engineering in the capsules that rode those magnificent boosters to orbit -- because they didn't have the pressure to engineer every last bit of weight out.
For the next generation or so -- that's human generation, not technological generation -- let's focus on unmanned space exploration and propulsion research, rather than mounting a chancy mission to Mars or the Moon. Accept the limitations and make our "robots" as "intelligent" and reliable as possible. That's what will spin off more breakthroughs here on Earth.
