Whenever I hear the nonsense about ‘manned space flight’ I have to cringe. Here’s why

  • The budget for space exploration is finite.
  • Any money spend on manned missions can not be spend on real space science.
  • No science has come from any manned missions (except for studies of human space physiology).
  • Manned missions cost orders or magnitude more that robotic missions but yield no scientific results.
  • Manned missions have and will cost human lives.
  • All hard scientific results so far have been obtained by inexpensive (compared to any manned mission) robotic probes and instruments.

So why does NASA still plan manned missions? I have no idea. In fact nobody has any idea as to why we would try to send humans into space. By-the-way: The so-called ‘Space Shuttle’ is a bad joke. It neither goes to space (unless you call being just outside the earth’s razor thin atmosphere ’space’), and it is no shuttle. It is, in fact, a death trap that has not yielded a single scientific insight during its multi-trillion dollar existence. It’s not even any good to put satellites into orbit; it’s failure rate is simply too high and its launch reliability too low. If NASA had just simply burned the money that they spend on the "Space Shuttle", continued to use the Saturn V rockets from the 60s for it’s high-payload scientific missions, we would have generated some heat for cold winters (especially if they had used one-dollar bills) and 14 people would still be alive instead of being dead as doornails.

There is now talk about human mission that involve  ‘going back to the moon’, or even ‘going to Mars’. It speaks for itself that the ‘Mission to Mars’ idea is being pushed by a president who thinks that Evolution is a questionable concept and who provided no money for this grand idea. The region between the planets is inhospitable to organic life and we currently have no good idea of how to shield the poor humans from the high-energy radiation that’s out there. At this point of our technological evolution we have no business sending people into space. From a scientific point of view, manned space exploration is a complete waste of lives, time and money. Anything a humans can do in space, a robot or robotic instrument can do better, cheaper and more reliably.

I think that human space exploration will happen eventually, if the human race survives long enough to make it technologically feasible. Now is not that time. We have bigger fish to fry, like gaining scientific knowledge about what’s out there. A ‘yes’ to manned space flight at this time is equivalent to a ‘no’ for real science. That’s the way to look at this issue, in my humble opinion.

While writing the above rant, I looked up some articles that would support my view…here goes.

Steven Weinberg’s view on the subject…
This prescient article on the Space Shuttle was written BEFORE the Challenger disaster….well worth reading.