It's weird how Apollo 13 has been remembered as a triumph of human space flight, when it is really the best argument against it. Put briefly, the problem is this: no one is willing to leave astronauts to die in space, no matter what the cost of saving them. Which is human of us!https://twitter.com/apollo_50th/status/1249897335171104770 …
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A fun exercise is to re-read
@andyweirauthor's magnificent book, the Martian, and keep track of all the science missions that get cancelled or co-opted in the course of saving one dude. Everyone sees it as heroic, of course. But that's like a third of the NSF budget sacrificed!Show this thread -
Apollo 13 didn't offer any real opportunities to burn through an entire agency budget trying to save the crew. But a Mars mission, or lunar base, would be different. Those would be on the scale of years, plenty of time to cost us a fortune if anything went wrong.
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The good news is, no one is going anywhere in our lifetime, since the economy died. But when we eventually have a working space program again, send the robots! Let human space flight become what it is meant to be, a nostalgia engine for old men, like military history or baseball
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Both pressures decrease in proportion to the fundamental cost of flight, and as volume increases.
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Alternatively, a culture of audacity can decouple the "no man left behind" attitude from one of "a priori perfection".
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If the crew committed to a certain plan, talked about it in public, included a very explicit do-not-rescue agreement, maybe participated in the actual planning around disasters and maximum rescue effort, maybe then it could work?
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i don't think you're wrong in the big picture, but did the apollo 13 "rescue" in particular itself really cost anything? like if had something had gone wrong they weren't throwing together a crew to go save them or anything, were they?
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but yeah ppl like to compare space exploration to the "age of exploration" at sea but like ..... those were just ships, and people got lost at sea all the time even before they started trying to cross oceans. there's nothing like space travel
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Apollo was paused for almost 2 years anyway after 13
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You could argue that we have trouble rationally budgeting for uncrewed missions as well—JWST has eaten a decade’s worth of NASA’s astrophysics budget. (Fortunately planetary science has been more disciplined lately.)
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