Hi Daniel, I think your arguments are 100% correct - today. But, I think one of the major reasons this is so is because of lack of infrastructure for manned spaceflight. We have 45 years of unmanned infrastructure where we have built on past successes and hopefully learned from past failures. With manned spaceflight we don't have much of that infrastructure. We've been in LEO for the past 35 years. If we had followed up Apollo with the originally intended Apollo applications we might very well have humans on Mars right now. So, we might have a scenario where we say - lets examine a rock 600 meters from here. 1) It would take Spirit or Opportunity two days to get there, I don't know how long to grind on it, and then awhile to examine it, etc. 2) Or send an astronaut on an EVA, he walks over and picks it up, etc. An example of this is HST servicing. Obviously we have some shuttle problems now - but we've been able to do it in the past. We train astronauts, send them up with the gear and they perform the upgrades. They are able to adjust quickly to problems they encounter. Now look at the unmanned side of this problem - NASA has said it would take several years to create a robotic craft to do this and then it would be doubtful that it would succeed on the first attempt. It's also doubtful that it would be able to implement all of the upgrades in the way the human can. So, I'm not saying that you are wrong - but where we have equal infrastructure I think human exploration can be part of the answer. However, I think it is true that robotics will always be what we use to expand our horizons. I.e. I think manned & unmanned have their place. Clear skies, Dale.

-----Original Message----- Subject: [Utah-astronomy] boots on the ground. (was Quite an admission fromNASA head).

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.

Consider the state of technology when JFK made his "go to the moon" speech. At that time a computer was the size of a refrigerator. That's just the CPU. Random access memory was done with tiny magnets and a kilobyte was considered a lot, a megabyte was undreamed of. Since then we have had integrated circuits and decades of Moore's Law racing along at the speed of compound interest. We can now make really smart machines and we don't have to send people into harms way to do what we want done. Consider how much more advanced the Spirit and Opportunity rovers are compared to Pathfinder rover of a decade ago and the Viking Landers of three decades ago. We have gotten a whole lot better and we aren't through improving yet.

We should also consider that for commercial use, there is nothing really out there beyond the geo-synchronous orbit. Scientific research is nice but we don't need people to do it. The cold war reasons for sending man into space are no longer valid and we are left with circular arguments about how we need manned space flight in order to study the effects of space flight on human beings. The current and near future prospects for space tourism are not much more than a scaled version of skydiving.

This is not a popular notion but other explorers have managed to figure it out. Some one went to great expense to transport a marine biologist to the deep ocean floor to study life at the thermal vents. The commander of the submersible noticed that the biologist was refusing to look out the window because the view was much better at the monitor for the camera on the extension arm. The obvious question was, "Why am I risking both our lives down here?" Now we use robot submersibles with cameras. The pilot and biologists are safe and warm on the surface ship.

What are keeping manned space flight going are the Boomers (my generation) who have grown up with the promise that we would be going into space. But that was a promise made when our technology was weak and the dangers weren't fully appreciated.

To use a cliché against this old idea I would have to say, "It's dead Jim"

Clear Skies DT