Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!dietz
From: dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Re: NSS and space settlement
Message-ID: <1989Feb15.082114.13293@cs.rochester.edu>
Date: 15 Feb 89 13:21:14 GMT
References: <1989Feb9.100756.22055@cs.rochester.edu> <1989Feb14.180253.18858@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 72

>>Did I suggest we not put men in space for centuries?

>Basically, yes.  In the same way that a call for a cost/benefit analysis
>is usually really a call for an excuse to kill the project (since costs
>are usually much more quantifiable than benefits), a call to do something
>"when it's appropriate" is usually really a call to forget it entirely.

Even if this were true, it would not imply forgeting manned
spaceflight for centuries.  The time constant on technological change
is shorter than that.

>>Did I suggest we not do research on better boosters?

>No, but you didn't suggest we do research on the physiological problems of
>long-term spaceflight, which is the other real issue for man in space.
>Stopping manned spaceflight means largely stopping such research, since
>we have no faithful ground-based simulation of space effects.  (Bed rest
>is a partial simulation but only a partial one.)

It is my opinion that long-term manned spaceflight is not justified for
the near term, so I don't see the value of this research.  How people
react to microgravity is not one of the burning issues in biology.

>>...I said that having people in space today doesn't matter a whole lot.

>Except in preparation for having them in space tomorrow.

That depends on *when* they're going to be in space.  Tomorrow, or
forty years from now?

>> ...Today's manned spaceflight is largely PR nonsense.

>If you believe that
>satellite deployment is the only important use of spaceflight, then of
>course manned spaceflight is largely PR.

What other uses are you proposing?  Space manufacturing in low orbit?
As Gerard O'Neill said (on TV), it's largely a PR stunt.  Satellite
repair?  At current launch costs that's not feasible.  Both of these
would benefit from reductions in launch cost; I don't see how they
would benefit from knowledge of the biological effects of long term
weightlessness.

>>About the Soviets: I think folks are going to be in for a rude surprise when
>>the Soviet space program goes nowhere.  The Soviet Union is in deep economic
>>trouble.  The standard of living has gone down in the last decade.  Gorby's
>>reforms are a failure...
>
>I seem to recall the same comments about the Soviet economy being made a
>decade or more ago, and the Soviets have made more than a little progress
>in space since then.

I don't recall that.  However, I don't believe the Soviet standard of
living was declining at that time.  Also, the Soviet government was not
at that time in such a turmoil of reform.

	Paul F. Dietz
	dietz@cs.rochester.edu

	It is interesting to note the curious mental attitude of
	scientists working on "hopeless" subjects.  Contrary to what
	one might at first suspect, they are all buoyed up by
	irrepressible optimism.  I believe there is a simple explanation
	for this.  Anyone without such optimism simply leaves the field
	and takes up some other line of work.  Only the optimists remain.
	So one has the curious phenomenon that workers in subjects in which
	the prize is big but the prospects of success very small always
	appear very optimistic.  And this in spite of the fact that, although
	plenty appears to be going on, they never seem to get appreciably
	nearer their goal.

		Francis Crick, "What Mad Pursuit"