tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) (12/19/89)
In article <129352@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> jmck@sun.UUCP (John McKernan) writes: > Thus manned space research makes sense >even if it is expensive if the goals of that research make sense, which is >currently not the case. I agree with John's position in this posting and also his response to Henry on the usefulness of Apollo; except that we're PRETTY close to making manned on-orbit research worth it -- close enough that we should probably get off the pot and do it. (And we are, in the persons of various heroes of socialist labor.) Manned planetary stuff is premature. But putting people off-planet, at minimal distance but over that space threshold, can act as a catalyst for future results. What human presence can bring to the party is serendipity. There is a good chance that if you just bring a few wheelbarrows full of stuff to play with on-orbit, you will come up with something unexpected that revolutionizes the way we think about space. After it happens everyone looks back and says it was inevitable -- but until you take a chance and play, you don't see it. Unfortunately the ruinous expense of space travel and bureaucratic mindset of space agencies combine to discourage this sort of thing. The operating paradigm for space flight is still that of the test pilot. You plan everything down to the second and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse on the ground until you're blue in the face, so when you go up it's all second nature and "just like the simulator" as our astronauts are so fond of saying. Well, if all you want is for things to be "just like the simulator" you can do this more cheaply than launching a rocket -- just stay in the simulator! The discoveries that spark next century's revolution in space thinking will in every case NOT have been "just like the simulator." They will be unexpected and unplanned-for. The people who make them will perforce be people who are open to new, messy, inconvenient ideas. Confirming them may require dumb activities that don't fit the mission timeline. Such ill-organized "play" is not something we ought to expect from today's NASA cadre of tanned, overachieving worker-bees, or even their Soviet colleagues drifting overhead. Our own crews, evenly divided between 'Nam-decorated fighter jocks and straight-A engineer valedictorians, spend their brief visits waking to college fight songs each morning and waving their hand lettered "truck driver" slogan signs lazily through the zero-G cabin air for the folks back home, proud to have made it to this white-room sweatshop, while downstairs the Beltway corridors hum with nickel shaving and manifest stretchouts. Meanwhile the Soviets keep loggin' those marathon hours in their hand-repaired monument to socialist progress, watching the empty orbits streak by outside, forlornly tending the telescopes, giving each other physicals and waiting for orders. Real discoveries are going to have to wait for crews with time on their hands, money and equipment and freedom to play with, and nothing nationalistic or bureaucratic to prove. I would put my money on the Japanese or the soon-united and strong Europeans. -- "NASA Awards Acronym Generation :(%( : Tom Neff System (AGS) Contract For Space : )%): tneff%bfmny@UUNET.UU.NET Station Freedom" - release 1989-9891 :(%( : ...!uunet!bfmny0!tneff