dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) (01/30/89)
In article <107@beaver.cs.washington.edu>, szabonj@minke (Nick Szabo) writes: > The only reasonable allocation is to spend the money on unmanned projects > (and research), and forego manned projects until they are affordable, Ah, but I think one could argue that right now manned projects are as affordable relative to unmanned projects as they will ever be. People are not getting cheaper, smarter, lighter, and more reliable every year. The human "launch window" is open wider today than it will ever be in the future, assuming we need to _justify_ human presence. Therefore (seemingly) the best way to insure that people go to space is to commit to enormously expensive, long-term manned projects. That provides several benefits. 1. Unmanned projects get canceled, delayed, and under-funded. This puts a slightly smaller coefficient on the exponential growth in unmanned technologies, keeping the justifiable human launch window open just a bit longer. 2. Large projects develop bureacracies and infrastructures to support them. When they go over budget, further appropriations are easy to obtain, to avoid junking the massive existing investment (the tiger-by-the-tail scenario--also called "double or nothing" in gambling). This helps in other ways: see number (1). Don't get me wrong, I'm all for humans in space. But I don't think clinging to some sort of Luddite justification is the fastest way to get them there. We won't go to space because we are all that necessary to our robots. We will go because we built the darned things that paved the way for us to go. But what do I know. Cheers, Dan Mocsny dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu