Space yays

[dubsartur]

Past NASA disasters have not had that effect, but a collapse in confidence in NASA might be damaging.  Another of Ceglowski's points is that only national space agencies have expertise in the tedious issues around keeping primates healthy outside the atmosphere.  The private space firms focus on rocket science and telecommunications even if their patrons have dreams of space stations or Mars colonies.

[Jubal]

You'd have thought that Blue Origin would have been developing some more expertise in this given their lean into the space tourism side, but maybe their much shorter tourist flights are just far too different to what's needed for keeping people alive over the time it takes to do a moon mission etc.

[dubsartur]

I think that so far, the private space launch companies have only sent people outside the atmosphere for missions that can be measured in hours.  Its only projects like Apollo and the Soviet, NASA, and Chinese space stations which put people outside the atmosphere for weeks or months and faced issues like muscle degradation in free fall or how to recycle water with near 100% effectiveness.  Of course, most of these issues would get easier with space launches that cost hundreds of dollars per kilo not $10,000 per kilo.  Eg. one of the solutions for solar storms outside the magnetosphere is to give a spacecraft a 'storm shelter' of materials which resist those nasty particles, and have the crew hide inside when NASA tells them a solar storm is coming ... but that costs mass.

[dubsartur]

In the 1970s, Jeanne Robinson imagined what freefall dance might be for a novel.  The Challenger disaster prevented her from going to space and she retired from dance in 1987 because it was hard to get Canadian arts grants when you live outside the greater Toronto Area.  In 2007, she got to try it out on a parabolic flight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7sk9dU5pvM  That little low-budget film is about beauty and joy and play, and the Ceglowskis of the world can't answer it, they have to try to talk around it in the logic of accountants and Teddy Roosevelt's critic who does not count.  In the end, so little of what we do is because its necessary or optimal.

I have trouble speaking sharply against human space travel in general, although I also have trouble believing in a future with thousands of humans as we know them beyond the Moon and the Lagrange points.

[dubsartur]

There is said to be an issue with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft which has kept two crew waiting six or seven weeks on the ISS as they decide whether the Starliner can safely return with crew.  I imagine that the poor relations between Russia and the US make it hard to get enough Soyuz capsules to return that way. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/yes-nasa-really-could-bring-starliners-astronauts-back-on-crew-dragon/

[Jubal]

I do wonder if the post-ISS world will end up with any of the grand designs people have for it or if we'll end up with things like Lunar Gateway being lost to budget arguments, over-reliance on private companies with the wrong expertise, etc etc.

[dubsartur]

I can't find this thread with Search under "space".

Ceglowski has a second essay about the problems with human missions to Mars with chemical rockets: it takes six months each way, and there is no abort, and the crew have to do everything themselves (currently the seven-person crew of the ISS has 80 hours for science per week, the other 1096 astronaut-hours are maintaining themselves and their environment).  One argument for a Moon mission is that it would let us see how human bodies respond to fractional gravity to reduce the chance of surprises when humans are living on Mars for 1, 2, or 17 months. https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.htm

I like being part of a species which is experimenting with this.

The phrase "you can just build things" is associated with postrationalists and some other American twitter communities with a bit more of an engineering and less of a mystical focus.  I think part of his seeming depression is related to too much Twitter although he probable hangs out with righty self-helpy tech folks in meatspace too.

My impression is that a lot of late-20th-century space advocacy focused on getting launch costs down and the possibility that NASA was bad at that (and sure the Space Shuttle was a boondoggle because they had to please too many parts of the post-FDR federal government). They were not as interested in the biomedicine, Musk's "send volunteers and let them risk it " is a counsel of despair.  The Apollo 1 fire was a good death compared to many of the ways that bodies and life support systems could fail on the way to Mars.

[Jubal]

I can't find this thread with Search under "space".

Ironically, having just tried it to check, this complaint now comes up as the third result, so you may have fixed the problem:)

I wonder if anyone has written in more depth (and ideally with some numbers and polling) about the social impact of things like space exploration as a sort of ideological concept: that is, there might be an interesting question as to whether a big exploration-style societal focus is easier to rally people around than "let's not burn the planet down" because people can see the big rocket go up in a way that they can't see climate change not happening, and whether that's something we need to consider when thinking about how we get public opinion behind scientific endeavours more generally.

[dubsartur]

I can't find this thread with Search under "space".

Ironically, having just tried it to check, this complaint now comes up as the third result, so you may have fixed the problem:)

I wonder if anyone has written in more depth (and ideally with some numbers and polling) about the social impact of things like space exploration as a sort of ideological concept: that is, there might be an interesting question as to whether a big exploration-style societal focus is easier to rally people around than "let's not burn the planet down" because people can see the big rocket go up in a way that they can't see climate change not happening, and whether that's something we need to consider when thinking about how we get public opinion behind scientific endeavours more generally.

I think there are discussions like that.  IIRC GURPS Transhuman Space postulated landing a bunch of small Internet-connected crawlers on Mars and letting people on earth control them for a fee or as a prize.

Climate change is very visible where I live and more so in the Canadian Arctic.

That would be a healthier thing for me to research than weird Internet communities, as long as I did notget sidetracked into specifically US culture and ideas such as safetyism. Thinking about US culture does not help me!

I have edited the OP.

[dubsartur]

Asteroid mining company AstroForge has lost control of their probe, the first private spacecraft to travel beyond the moon https://www.space.com/space-exploration/private-spaceflight/i-think-we-all-know-that-hope-is-fading-private-odin-asteroid-probe-is-tumbling-in-space

Its worth stressing that so far all the money in space has been in communications and observation and earth orbit is what you need for that. So while private companies have helped reduce capitalist launch costs (USSR-derived systems used to be cheaper than US systems) there are areas like life support and long-term, long-range missions where almost all the expertise is in government space agencies. Space tourism has limits too since 'send people to orbit for a few hours' is much simpler than what the ISS does let alone a crewed mission to Luna or Mars. Businesses like asteroid mining or lunar He3 for fusion are still speculative.

[Jubal]

Yeah, asteroid mining feels like one of those things that sounds cool but, as with any form of trade, moving things a long way gets difficult when the things are heavy bulk payloads. I kinda struggle to imagine how one could make it profitable.