From: hal@finney.org
Date: Tue Dec 07 1999 - 11:07:08 MST
Alintelbot@aol.com writes, quoting Mac Tonnies:
> The recent loss of the Mars Polar Lander, the second in a series of probes to
> fall victim to NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" mission philosophy, provides
> an excellent opportunity to reassess our commitment to Mars exploration. The
> "human imperative" advocates nothing less than a manned mission in place of
> all future robotic missions, preferably to begin as soon as possible.
Failures will happen. In a manned mission, people are killed; in
an unmanned mission, equipment is lost. Isn't the latter much more
acceptable?
The real problem with the recent failures is that we aren't succeeding in
improving the reliability. Each failure seems to be due to a different
cause, but when those causes are fixed the failures still happen.
It seems to me that it will be necessary to spend a lot more money on
these probes, to have even more redundancy and reliability built-in.
There needs to be much more in the way of self-monitoring and perhaps
even self-repairing capability. We have to build systems that can survive
months and years in space with high reliability, and we should do more
experiments in earth orbit to try to find out what we're doing wrong.
We might have to rethink the design and put more of the budget into the
infrastructure and less into the "conceptual payload", the sensing and
analysis devices. Granted, this increases costs, but given the recent
track record it may save money in the long run, by providing better
quality information about the nature of the failures and by reducing
the failure rate.
As for putting men on Mars, there was a time when space advocates fixed
their hopes on a manned mission to the Moon. They assumed that once this
goal was accomplished there would be a natural follow-on in terms of
exploration, experimental bases, and eventual colonization. As we know,
none of this happened.
The same thing could happen with Mars, only increased to the nth degree
because of the tremendously greater expense. Mars is not any more
interesting than the moon to the general public, not after you've seen
it for a few hours. Dust, rocks, and sand, nothing more. You can find
the same thing in any desert, and we don't spend trillions of dollars
to send people out into the desert.
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:06:00 MST