What Has Space Travel Done For Us
What Has Space Travel Done For UsTeflon. But as BillyConnelly? once asked, wouldn't you want your eggs to stick to the pan in space? (And not teflon anyway, which was invented in the 1930's)
Communication satellites, better aircraft, better medical equipment, better weather prediction....
Naah. That's from putting objects into space. I interpreted space travel as putting people into space.
The medical advances were directly from the biological telemetry used to keep tabs on the astronauts in the rockets. Not much point in measuring the pulse of a satellite, is there?
If you live in the US and claim to be a student or teacher (which wasn't a lie for me at the time that I did this...), NASA will happily send you quite a few volumes of literature which make their case. Several of these discuss "spinoff" - technology which was invented as part of the space program and is now used groundside. There are a lot of examples. Of course the subject of this page could be interpreted as "What direct use has travelling through space been?", to which the answer is "none". (It will be directly useful when lunar mining is begun... which nobody is planning.) Personally I consider the real question to be not "should space travel be done?" but "should governments finance space travel?" -- DanielKnapp
I'm with Daniel. I don't have a problem with space travel, exploration, etc., but when it comes to government money, I often wonder if all that money could be spent in a more directly beneficial way. (And while I hate to sound like a cynic, all the "exploration is good for the human spirit" stuff sounds suspiciously like BreadAndCircuses? to me.)
Also remember that the space race has nothing to do with bettering peoples lives and everything to do with showing off missile capabilities.
Since when is the SpaceShuttle a missile - and telecommunication satellites, and telescopes, and weather satellites, these better people's lives! Get a positive bent on life!
For one, the SpaceShuttle is a very very late comer to the game, by then the MutuallyAssuredDestruction situation is well established as both sides already have so many ICBMs to annihilate each other. Second, I bet there are more telescopes aimed at the ground (i.e. spy sat) than aimed at the sky. Any contribution to people's lives are simply a secondary side-effect of the primary military purpose. Compare, for example, to the invention of explosives.
Why do Americans pursue the challenge of space? Because we ran out of land when we hit California.
"It's good for the spirit." -- Dave Scott, commander, Apollo 15
WernherVonBraun said it best when he described a human being as the best possible computer you could put in a spacecraft. (He also went on to point out its advantages in being easily mass-produced with unskilled labor.)
Production is easy (and fun). Maintenance costs however are through the roof, and wall, and closet door...
Velcro? (nope, invented in Switzerland in the 1940's) Tang? -- An orange-flavored powdered instant beverage mix. Produced by General Foods since 1959 and used beginning in the Gemini program, it was highly touted for a while in advertising as the breakfast of astronauts. http://retrofuture.web.aol.com/spacefood.html
Don't forget Space Food Sticks! Mmmm...
Space travel has made in-situ repair of satellites possible.
It keeps us in orbit around the sun!
It gets me to and from work every day.
See WhatHasTimeTravelDoneForUs
All this kind of remonds me of the WhatHaveTheRomansEverDoneForUs scene from MontyPython's LifeOfBrian. - IanPhillips.
CarlSagan said, regarding the Teflon argument, something like, "Buy this multi-million dollar rocket and we'll throw in a FREE FRYING PAN!"
And about fourteen jillion other technology spinoffs, but let's not interrupt a perfectly good rant...
A lot of these are urban myths. Tang, Teflon, and Velcro came before space travel. (Perhaps space-travel popularized them.) [EditHint: combine all spin-off claims around here to a single list.]
Why would anyone want to go into space? Space is a vacuum. It sucks! Great habitat for robots, lousy habitat for people. No bar, no room service, bring your own air, yet the rack rates start in the megabucks? DoesntTakeARocketScientist to figure out that a better and cheaper vacation could be had practically anywhere on earth.
Three words: Zero G Sex.
It's all fun and games until somebody cracks their head on the ceiling. Or was it the floor?
LASIK eye surgery. The LADARVision 4000 technology was inducted into the Space Technology Hall of Fame in 2004. The laser and eye-tracking device to reshape the cornea in LASIK is based on this technology, used to assist spacecraft in delicate docking maneuvers.
Yes, but if we took the half-trillion dollars spent on manned space missions and invested in *direct* research, there may have been other or similar discoveries. I don't dispute that manned space travel produces earth-usable discoveries, but it may not be the most cost-effective route to such.
The aqueducts?
Pilot G-2 ink pens
Part of a debate on manned versus robotic missions.
he's looking for and having a robot pick random pebbles yields exactly the same results.
No, that's not the way its done. Robots remotely inspect stuff with spectragraphs and microscopes BEFORE bagging them. Dozens of geologists back on Earth can then vote on what to keep and where to explore.
If it had made a significant difference you wouldn't know about it anyways, unless you would read reports concerning the stones brought back from the moon, which one can safely bet you have not.
I've informally noticed more references to Apollo 15 rocks than Apollo 17 rocks (Apollo 17 had a geologist) as far as "interesting" findings. Maybe Apollo 15 happened to just land in a lucky spot; but if variety of spots is what increases the science, then robots score better there too.
Life support and related safety systems jack up the cost of manned missions way beyond that of robotic ones.
No Landing
Landing humans on Mars is not a real goal because we haven't solved the "life" puzzle yet. We will need to be almost certain there will be no cross-seeding of dangerous microbes either direction. Otherwise, Mars life risks killing Earth life and visa verse. If we contaminate Mars with Earth-life, we may be forever changing it before we get a chance to study it.
Mass off-Earth testing of samples will first be needed for that to happen. That will take lots of robots and an orbital manned lab, perhaps hooked to the space station.
There's little chance of Martian life getting to Earth from the probes - we sterilized the Apollo gear extensively. Contamination of Mars with Earth life is much more plausible
Testing has since revealed that our sterilization techniques are imperfect. The only sure way is to seal them, and bake them long in an oven. However, that's a bear on electronics, lubricant, and propellant.
LVAD: Left ventricular assist device. The latest implantable ones are tiny pumps developed using experience gained from the turbopumps on the space shuttle main engines.
"I've forgotten how much I hate space travel" -- C3P0, Star Wars
Space travel launched the career of StanleyKubrik?. He was the fellow who faked the moon landings. Most other rockets worked and got stuff into space. The Saturn V however was always too unstable to get off the ground.
You're kidding, right?
I heard it on the Internet. It must be true.
see: MeUsThemEveryone
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