From: szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Re: With telepresence, who needs people in Earth orbit?
Date: 3 Sep 92 14:28:20 GMT
Article-I.D.: techbook.1992Sep3.142820.19532
Organization: TECHbooks --- Public Access UNIX --- (503) 644-8135

In article <1992Aug24.175759.1@fnalf.fnal.gov> higgins@fnalf.fnal.gov (Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey) writes:

>I'd guess that [Nick] too would like to develop the 
>capabilities of "real" robots, telepresence, and even Real Astronauts.  

Actually, both anthros and anthropormorphic machines are overrated
for solving the most important long-term space industry problems (eg 
extraction of ice and metal, automated processing in microgravity,
etc.)  Sure I'd like to see astronauts and "real" robots, but they are
not worth the resources spent, especially the $10's of billions wasted
on astronauts.  Telepresence, automated extraction and processing tech,
and the like are quite important for future space development, as well
as being the most ripe for spin-offs in Earthside industries.

While space activists and NASA neglect these critical fields,
the most important such work is still going on down here on Earth,
in areas from medicine to oil to cable-laying.

>He simply is not willing to
>pay the price of Space Station Fred to get this.  He's not even
>willing to pay for Shuttle operations. 

I don't totally oppose this kind of stuff, I just think it has gotten
way out of hand, and people thinking they are promoting space
development are obsessed with this part of the space
program which is really not producing very much.  I support 
Shuttle/Spacelab if they could operate on a much lower
budget, and I'd support Mir as a joint U.S./Russian venture
if NASA put no more than $500 million per year into that. I'm not 
totally opposed to astronauts, but the current obsession with astronauts 
has totally gotten out of hand, to where it eats up 2/3 of the NASA
budget, has perverted what could have been a cost and reliability
breakthrough in Ariane 5, and  has starved planetary exploration along
with hundreds of lines of research.

>Frequent
>and simple access to orbit is the key.   What NASA has now is "We're
>only gonna get one chance this decade to fly our gadget, and if it
>doesn't work our careers are shot, so it must be super-reliable and
>gold-plated."

The problem is, projects like TSS and SSF are designed around a launcher 
that doesn't give frequent and simple access to orbit.  TSS, for example,
could easily have been a quarter the size, a tenth the cost, teleoperated, 
launched commercially, and provided 90% of the needed data.  Instead,
NASA plays politics with every experiment -- use our big astronaut pork
projects or die.  Thus the bloating and most of the problems of the
Great Observatories, Galileo, and other Shuttle-tied exploration.
What Henry, when he criticizes this bloating, has to realize is that 
this is the direct consequence of the politics of astronauts and i
centralized projects.  

The lean/mean planetary projects, like NEAR, MESUR, lunar orbiter, and 
Artemis lander _still_ have difficulty getting funded, because they don't 
use Shuttle or SSF, even after all of the realization of the cost-effectiveness
of small, quick exploration.  Planetary science has plucked out the mite in its own eye, but it is still being destroyed by the mote in the astronaut-world's
eye.  We need the strategy of frequency and simplicity in all of NASA if 
we are to have effective NASA programs.


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