But First We Must Send Robots

Monday May 17, 2010 by Tim Maly

I was reading this interview with Dr. Story Musgrave on space flight. In it, he drops an amazing statistic. For the cost of the International Space Station, he says, we could have had 300 Voyager missions. 300!

photo credit: Paloetic

Let’s allow some ideological slop for inflation, increasingly complex machines, and perhaps a secret agenda. How far off do you think the estimate is? 2x? 3x? Even at 100 missions, we’re considering two orders of magnitude more trips than the ISS gives us. Listen, I love the International Space Station. It’s right there on the same blurry boundary between architects and cyborgs that the space program was at 50 years ago. No one enjoyed Bruce Sterling’s Dwell interview about ISS living conditions more than me.

But 300! That’s multiple missions to every planet, moon and pseudo planet (we love you, Pluto!) in the solar system. I don’t buy the argument that human spaceflight is more inspiring than robot space flight. Let’s be honest with one another, which was more exciting? The now routine ISS docking and re-crewing procedures, the corporate drenched SpaceShipOne pseudo-flight, or the life and death struggle of Spirit to stay operational on Mars? Let me give you a hint. Two of those missions do not have a fan fiction LiveJournal, nor did they star in an episode of XKCD.

Let’s discuss the moonwalk. For the overwhelming majority of humans it was a media event, just as remote as the guided missile strikes in Iraq. The dream that one day you too could walk on the Moon? Maybe. Maybe that flew in 1969. It’s 2010 now and most of us are not homeric astronaut demigods. We’re dudes and ladies with robot phones and Wii controllers.

Geoffrey Miller is worried that our increasingly compelling virtual content will drive us down a dead end. Better entertainment systems will keep us trapped on the planet as we get more and more into World of Warcraft or whatever. I have a different theory. What if this stuff is all training?

Generations of gamers are getting used to telepresence. We spend all kinds of time projecting ourselves into imagined distant worlds. Why not into real distant worlds? The US military is miles ahead of the rest of us here. Kids in Vegas patrol the roads of Afghanistan. They change shifts, while the robot remains in the air. It’s far more efficient and the vehicles are much, much cheaper.

The dreamed approach of putting humans back on the Moon and then on Mars. This is a high expense, high stakes, high risk proposition and we have only the dimmest idea of what’s there. I like Brooks and Flynn’s idea. Send the robots first.

Send thousands of robots. Little robots – cheap ones that are disposable. More robots than NASA can manage. Fast, cheap, and out of control.

Want to inspire the kids of tomorrow? Forget the heroic myths. That kind of inspiration is over. “Anyone can be the President.” No they can’t. We all know it.

Instead of some guy or another walking on Mars, how about this: “Hey kids of Middlevale Elementary, our class has booked off Mars Swarm Unit 213.3 for the rest of May. We’ll be directing the explorations of an actual robot on Mars.”

“You mean we get to drive an actual Mars robot?!”

Look, the only reason we know a lot of what we do about the water cycle on Mars is because a robot’s wheel got stuck. There’s so much that we don’t know about the planet that we’re just tripping over discoveries. We can’t help but find out new things. We don’t even know if Mars is the most interesting place to go.

By all means, let’s keep experimenting with the social, architectural, and cultural needs of a human space exploration program. But while we work out how to get a small group of people to live in a tiny enclosed space for months on end without killing each other, let’s spend a bunch more time figuring out where we should send them. Send humans to explore, but send robots first.

Adam

Tim thought no one agreed with him, but I do!

Actually had the same thought not too long ago, and wrote about it here:
http://interdome.blogspot.com/2010/04/wikipedia-eater.html

At the end of a long ramble about weird stuff that was just totally nuts, I thought that maybe the retreat of human space-flight would lead a new renaissance in space exploration.

To cling to human-space flight is kind of bourgeois, in my opinion. Reminds of the days of the great white male explorers, conquering dark continents while the Sherpas carry their specimen jars. Yeah, sending a human into space is okay. But maintaining a flimsy space-outpost just to do zero-gravity experiments is like buying an RV without wheels. Sure, you could eventually travel the continent, but in the meantime you're an eye-sore in the low-earth orbit of your neighborhood. But hey, it's an aluminum roof over your head, right?

The really interesting science possibilities (to me) are out in exo-places where humans are not going to go in a hundred years, let alone by 2020. And computers & communications are advancing faster than propulsion and life-support systems. Seems like a obvious strategy decision to me.

Load up that space-shotgun with double-barrels of double-aught solar-powered smart-phone satellite shot, and start banging that sucka off.
simonbostock

The most exciting part about sending people is the marketing opportunity. There was a whole generation of kids who wanted to be astronauts and now there aren't.

What I'd like to see is a global reality TV show along the lines of Astronaut Idol where a bunch of people from every nation compete to go to space. All the advertising and merchandise goes towards building some kind of permanent settlement. I'm talking about a maximally cynical effort to enthuse the entire planet about leaving.

In the meantime, by all means send out stacks of robots so we can learn how to strip mine asteroids/meteors/pseudo-planets. But the aim's always got to be people leaving the planet. Some on a permanent basis.

I could, if pushed, come up with some good reasons for this. But I'd be kidding myself. I just feel this is the right thing to do. I imagine this is how religion feels.
Christopher Mims

Everyone in this comment thread is a complete fucking idiot. I'm sorry, it had to be said.

If we want to explore the solar system, the last thing we will do is send unreliable, vulnerable, heavy, expensive, myopic flesh and blood, whose only relevant senses are sight in a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We have wasted ungodly amounts of money finding out how plants, crystals and fruit flies grow in zero gravity (about the only sort of experiments going on on the ISS these days) – meanwhile, all the knowledge of value has come from robots sent to other planets and robots orbiting our own planet (i.e. satellites, planetary probes, orbital telescopes, etc.)

If robots are good enough for the skies of Afghanistan, then they are ten times as suited to the hostile environment of outer space.

Seriously, the longer we dick around with launching over-developed primates in steel coffins into near earth orbit, the longer it will take to accomplish something real in space, whatever it is.

Call me when space tourism is cheap or a trip on the space elevator only takes a week. Until then (i.e., until 1000 years from now) we need to get down to business. That means automation. You people need to stop reading space opera and pick up some actual hard SF sometime – the kind that's about physics, not fucking green aliens on the 3rd moon of Vagtropia.
rob

Tim, have you read Spin? In a round-about way, it's kind of the tale of what happens when we follow your advice, but extrapolated far into the future (and past).

(And, since you asked, I think the robots are a fine idea.)
steve davidson

I disagree on an emotional level. Sitting and watching the moon landing/walk - or perhaps even more so, the rescue of Apollo 13 - have/had a far stronger emotional response for me than have any of the robotic missions (though I have enjoyed many of those as well - front row seats for Viking).
There's no substitute for knowing that PEOPLE have been out there. Manned missions embody the risk and give us something difficult to strive for.
Another commentator stated that this is an issue of political will. I agree, we could be doing both (and more so of both), but folks are more interested in "inner space" these days. We've lost the "pioneering spirit" and the willingness to risk lives to develop new frontiers.
How many folks can name the first human to walk on the Moon? Most. How many can name the first robot on the Moon? Few. That tells the whole story right there.
Tim Maly

I don't think that tells the story at all. The first robot got to the moon after the first people. And it was Russian! Old news. Not many people can name the 4th person to walk on the moon either. People do know Cassini, Spirit, Opportunity. These are robots whose exploits are followed all over the world. We know Hubble too. Can most people name the first person to live on the ISS?

Landing on the Moon didn't actually open up any frontiers. 50 years later, no one lives there. It was an awesome (in the original sense of the word) achievement, it gripped the world and then it passed into the myths of history.

What I'm talking about it a sustained quotidian exposure to other worlds. Hands-on exploration and discovery. This is the tinkerers approach to space. Make it accessible. Make it something you can play with. Make it seem achievable, and let the kids go wild.
Geoffrey A. Landis

You are posing a false choice. NASA is about one half of one percent of the federal budget, and the space station is something like one tenth of that. We could easily do both, if we wanted to. It's a political question, not a lack of money.
Also, I should point out that we HAVE been flying all those robotic missions you mentioned-- yes, the equivalent of hundreds of Voyagers: Cassini and Huygens to Saturn, Galileo to Jupiter, a dozen missons to Mars, missions to Mercury and Pluto and asteroids and comets. We can do both, and we ARE doing both.
August

Very Ender's Game of you. I find the idea of people up there (beyond our orbit, at any rate) more exciting than robots, but the more I learn about both the financial and technical limitations, the more I come to believe that robots are the superior space exploration option. (Charlie Stross has an excellent blog post on the subject: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html )
Scott N

I can appreciate your idea of putting more robots up but at the same time I think we need to be more realistic. While building the ISS may have cost a lot I believe it was a necessary step to foster more orbital research and development. It is also a great platform for nations to work together on such research. And looking from a material standpoint, it's still there! Everything we built for the ISS is still (mostly) in operation. Whereas, if we just launched robots, we would send them out and that would be it. We still, so far, have no way to retrieve them.

Now, lets say we do have plenty of them up there... do we really want to have kids control them? Yes, it would be a good learning experience, but they are still expensive "toys" for kids to be playing with in the classroom. And lets not forget Albert Einstien's theorys about relativity. There is quite a lag in control time limited by the speed of light. It takes 180 seconds or so for a signal to get from earth to mars. Is it really going to be that exciting for a kid to control a robot that takes more than minute to process their commands?

Like I said, I appreciate your idea, but I think a little more thought needs to go into it before we just lunch 300 voyagers.

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