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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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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... fiction?
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Ppl did die without the large scale rescue you mentioned. It’s because they sacrificed during the R & D phase and there were no camera pointing at them. Perhaps, a compromise is to only talk about successful missions.
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IIRC China ends up scrapping some nifty deep space probe as part of the rescue mission & gets a seat on the next Mars mission as trade. Given your thoughts on manned space flight it must have pissed you off to no end.
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Part of the lack of realism is assuming that there exists a scenario where it's feasible to save someone by spending huge amounts of extra money.
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In most cases, either people would just die or saving them would not compromise anything other than the mission they were on.
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