Well you're right Chuck (as usual). In my opinion, there are good cases for both manned and unmanned space flight. The trick is to properly identify which one should be used for each scenario. I'd like to see people going to other planets, maybe send a probe or two first to check it out well. Things like delivering payloads to LEO would seem more appropriate for automation. It seems to me we have wasted a lot of time and money and expertise of astronauts just doing the LEO thing with the shuttle all these years. If you're going to go into space, go do some real exploring, don't just circle the earth. Chuck Hards <chuckhards@yahoo.com> wrote:I disagree with you, Daniel. Humans have a habit of poisoning their environments and killing each other. Unless we suddenly gain a whole lot of wisdom and dump a whole lot of ancestral competitive baggage, long-term survival dictates that we simply must become a multi-world species...in the truly long-term, even multi-system. Perhaps in the very short-term, robot explorers can be used effectively, especially where costs are prohibitively high or transit times inordinately long. But risk is part of the human experience and only invertebrates hide in the shadows their entire lives. There are numerous deaths in automobiles and commercial aircraft, yet these conveyances are not damned outright because for the most part we have integrated them into our society and accept the risk, which is actually fairly small on the individual scale. The same will one day happen for manned spaceflight. The meek shall inherit the earth, the rest of us will go to the stars. Or, to borrow a phrase I'm sure you've heard, to "Boldy Go Where No Man Has Gone Before". ;)
From: daniel turner
I hate to admit it, but I agree with Mike Carnes on this one. I would further add that what has really happened is that manned space flight is an idea whose time is past.
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