Neil Armstrong: Obama is hurting the space effort

[hi_im_god]

"The observations of guys like Alan Shepherd and John Glenn were critical in getting subjective as well as objective feedback for vehicle design."

vehicle design to be human rated. this is the same as arguing that we must launch chocolate bars into space in order to determine the proper design for the safe return of chocolate bars from their missions in space. it's a circular argument.

"A man on the moon can observe, "This place is clearly not made up of green cheese." It clearly would be harder and would take longer to build unmanned craft for the same purpose, though unmanned craft would cost less per mission and would be expendable."

that part is just wrong. it clearly would be easier and take less time (since you no longer have to worry about a craft being human rated) to get a robotic craft designed to distinguish mineral from cheese. robots extend our ability to make observations. they don't change the quality of those observations. there's nothing an astronaut is going to see on mars that wouldn't be shown just as clearly and much cheaper by a robot.

"Also, much of the advancement that flourished out of the space program came from the drive to miniturize the systems to acceptable weights. The part that drove that weight requirement was the distance to the moon, and the fact that the living and breathing astronauts needed all the systems to sustain them, and the space, maneuverability and redundancy to make sure that they had the highest chance of performing their mission and surviving."

this isn't a bad response. it's essentially true that some of the drive to miniaturize was driven by a human space program. i'd give it maybe 0.01% of the overall credit. the invention of the transistor and later the integrated circuit had nothing to do with manned space flight and i'd say those had far more impact. whatever credit you want to give it you need to weigh it against the enormous ongoing cost of human space flight.

"As an analogy, think of it this way: you are the custodian or security guard at a facility, and you are patrolling it. Remote sensors and cameras can tell operators if anything is moving, what the temperature is, humidity, etc. But it would take a security guard walking the halls to say, "I smell something -- there might be a gas leak and we'd better call the gas company and fire department.""

or an engineer smart enough to build a sensor for methane. and even if you built all that stuff and forgot the methane sensor, it's still cheaper to build another probe and launch it later than pay what it takes to keep a security guard alive on mars.

tl,dr? i don't blame you.

i'll make it short. going to mars will wind up costing near a trillion dollars before it's done. if we're lucky.

to what end?

get over star trek. start investing in real science.