Why go where no man has gone before?

[Mark1031]

Prominent physicist Steven Weinberg expresses my view exactly here. What a waste of resources to put human beings in space. Think of all the real science that could be done if we just scrapped the whole thing. I love the whole science fiction Star Trek thing as much as the next science nerd but lets not have it cloud our reason to the tune of billions of dollars. What say you?

Nobel laureate disses manned spaceflight
Particle physicist calls international space station an 'orbital turkey'
By Ker Than
Staff Writer
Space.com
Updated: 8:39 a.m. PT Sept 19, 2007
BALTIMORE - A physics Nobel Laureate issued a scathing critique today of NASA's manned spaceflight program and questioned the scientific usefulness of the international space station.

"The international space station is an orbital turkey," said Steven Weinberg, a particle physicist at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize in physics. "No important science has come out of it. I could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value."

Weinberg made the comments while speaking at a dark energy workshop at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

While praising NASA's robotic missions like the Mars Exploration Rovers, Weinberg said the manned part of the space program has contributed essentially nothing to science.

"Human beings don't serve any useful function in space," Weinberg told SPACE.com. "They radiate heat, they're very expensive to keep alive and unlike robotic missions, they have a natural desire to come back, so that anything involving human beings is enormously expensive."

Launching humans into space and landing astronauts on the moon in the early years of the space age captured the public imagination, but those days are long past, Weinberg argues.

"I think the public imagination gets very rapidly bored with the sight of humans in space knocking golf balls around," he said, referring to a recent commercial publicity stunt in which cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin hit a golf ball during a space station maintenance spacewalk.

"On the other hand, [the public] was fascinated by the kinds of things done by rovers on Mars," Weinberg said. "I think our political leaders underestimate the intelligence of the public in thinking they won't be fascinated by real scientific discoveries. I think enormous sums are wasted on manned spaceflight that continually crowd out science missions."

History repeats
Weinberg pointed to NASA's treatment of its Beyond Einstein program as an example of the agency's misplaced priorities. Beyond Einstein consists of five proposed space missions designed to build upon and expand Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

"Only one of them is slated to go ahead, and given NASA's record, if we suddenly run into extra expenses in the manned spaceflight program, that will be put on the back burner, just as has been done time and time again by NASA," Weinberg said.

A recent report by the National Research Council concluded that the Joint Dark Energy Mission — designed to investigate a mysterious force that scientists think is accelerating the expansion of the universe — is the only Beyond Einstein mission ready to begin construction.


"All the others have been put on the back burner," Weinberg said. "This is at the same time that NASA's budget is increasing, with the increase being driven by what I see on the part of the president and the administrators of NASA as an infantile fixation on putting people into space, which has little or no scientific value."

For Weinberg, the federal government and NASA's treatment of the Beyond Einstein program is a repeat of what happened to the Superconducting Super Collider, an enormous ring particle accelerator that was slated for construction in Texas but scrapped by Congress in 1993 because it was deemed too expensive and would have taken funds away from another project under consideration: the international space station.

© 2007 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20869407/

 

[LightFang]

Well of course space exploration isn't going to yield any immediate positive benefits. That's why private industry doesn't really want to waste its money there. That's why the government will step in and do it for us. Because knowledge is a good thing! Yayyy.

 

[Kozmos]

What else are we gonna do?

 

[Masquerouge]

Looks like someone got jealous because he failed at getting funds?



More seriously, space exploration, to me at least, is not only about the scientific benefits.

 

[Mark1031]

What else are we gonna do?

Read the article. There are 5 basic science (unmanned) projects that get pushed to the side to pay for the useless manned space program.

 

[Masquerouge]

Read the article. There are 5 basic science (unmanned) projects that get pushed to the side to pay for the useless manned space program.

TBH, if some science projects need money, I would rather pull it out of the Defense budget than from another science project.

 

[Fugitive Sisyphus]

I agree that manned space flight is a waste of resources. On the other hand, if I think of it as welfare for astronauts, I don't mind it too much.

 

[Irish Caesar]

There is something heroic and noble in going where no man has gone before.

The Space Station isn't it, though.

 

[fishjie]

um, that guy is a narrow minded idiot. eventually, we will want to colonize other planets. how will we do so, unless the space program perfects its astronaut training techniques and perfects its processes for building space stations/ space ships?

seriously, what a moron.

Well of course space exploration isn't going to yield any immediate positive benefits. That's why private industry doesn't really want to waste its money there. That's why the government will step in and do it for us. Because knowledge is a good thing! Yayyy.

um, there are people in private industry who are trying to build space ships. paul allen is one notable example.

 

[warpus]

We need to continue the manned space program for several reasons..

The most important one, in the long term, is that we're going to discover new technologies that will eventually allow us to send colonists to other planets & other star systems.

If we keep sending just robots into space, we'll never learn how to keep people alive in space for extended periods of time - without the Earth's magnetic field, for instance.

IMO colonization of other planets is very important for our species' future, so, by extension, manned space flight is very important as well.

 

[fishjie]

We need to continue the manned space program for several reasons..

The most important one, in the long term, is that we're going to discover new technologies that will eventually allow us to send colonists to other planets & other star systems.

If we keep sending just robots into space, we'll never learn how to keep people alive in space for extended periods of time - without the Earth's magnetic field, for instance.

IMO colonization of other planets is very important for our species' future, so, by extension, manned space flight is very important as well.

my thoughts exactly. with the overpopulation, pollution, and other problems that plague our planet, we're gonna need other places to live. that scientist is a fool.

 

[puglover]

Leave sending people into space to the tourist industry of the future. Public funds should be spent on more useful pursuits.

 

[woody60707]

The book I just read Vorpal Blade, had this same idea.

We do it too see how hard it is. To gain experience from it.

 

[Cookie Crumbs]

All the money going into space exploration would be better spent finding ways to tackle the problems on the planet we already live on.
Colonising a new planet is not an easy solution if things go belly-up on Earth, and it appears the latter will happen a lot sooner than being able to do the former.
In the very long term manned spaceflight is a priority, but not right now.

 

[LightFang]

Feh, you adopt a provincial view, while the rest of us have vistas of the future!

 

[Leonel]

I would like for man to go into space but yeah money could be used to tackle problems back on Earth. But I guess a good reason to look into space exploration is to build self sufficient colonies in case an asteroid hits Earth and does serious damage. At least one bastion of humanity would continue on if Earth was devastated.

 

[carmen510]

Pull it out of the '08 election campaign funds and non-environmental friendly corperations

I mean, the candidates already have enough backing, people pretty much know who to vote for. And we need to improve the environment, even if the economy suffers a bit, cuz' soon there WON'T BE an economy. And it seems we already screwed up Earth so much, we need to take out all the pollution that's already here.

 

[robo-snickers]

well what else are you goin to do with all those lovely virgen women!

 

[carmen510]

Meh, just buy an island in the Pacific!

 

[Smidlee]

The most important one, in the long term, is that we're going to discover new technologies that will eventually allow us to send colonists to other planets & other star systems.

First, this is a statement of faith.
As someone else has noted, for mankind to realistically go to another solar system and colonists another planet he doesn't just need to discover new technology but also discover new laws of physics as well. For the law of physics that is now known to man will not get there no matter how advance our technology becomes.