Man in Space. Or not.

Whether we evolved to be this way or God simply decided that we were going to be this way, we operate best in environments that have air, food, water, gravity and a certain amount of light and heat. Put a man in space and he dies. Fans of science fiction know that one of the most horrible ends for anyone is to be "spaced" or "sent out an airlock". It's an ugly way to die.

In order not to die, space-faring people must duplicate many of the conditions as found on Earth. Air, food, water, light and heat are manufactured in a little bubble around the people who go into space. The size of that bubble may vary from a special suit of clothes wrapped around the person, to a considerably larger bubble the size of the International Space Station.

Manufacturing gravity is a bit more difficult and nobody does that just yet. As a result, lots of effort is being expended to understand how to keep people healthy in weightless environments. You see, if you just float along inside your bubble and don't do the right things, you'll turn very fragile and eventually die. We were designed for life on Earth. We weren't at all designed to go into space. We have to take steps to ensure that we don't die "out there".

Why bother talking about this? Well, I like the idea of exploring the universe, and of making discoveries that will help us here on our home bubble - the Earth. Unfortunately, everything that explores the universe in person has to either orbit the Earth or just plain leave the Earth behind. To stay in orbit, stuff has to be moving at 17,500 MPH. To leave the Earth, stuff has to be moving at over 20,000 mph. That's like travelling from New York to Los Angeles in about 10 minutes. It's really fast.

EVERYTHING that is going to leave has to be accelerated to that speed. It doesn't matter if it's water, people, toilet paper or computers, it still qualifies as "stuff" and has to get up to that speed in order to go exploring. That takes a lot of power in a very short time. It's one of the reasons we have NASA. If you don't have "a collection of inventive and smart people" you don't get "stuff accelerating to 20,000 MPH".

NASA figures out how to get stuff to go fast, and they also spend a lot of work on figuring out how to ensure that people can survive in space. The lethality of problems is illustrated by the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia disasters. Getting to and from orbit is a tough problem to solve and it can and has resulted in disaster.

My question is this: why do we put people into space? I've just outlined the basic problem of getting stuff into space, how homo sapiens is ill-suited to be in space, and how we have to accelerate all the stuff that we need to survive up to really high speeds. What are the returns for all this?

Advocates of putting people into space will perhaps speak of the gut-level need for mankind to explore. It was that very sense of exploration that led to the discovery of, and ultimate settling of America by Europeans. There is also the more practical argument of having somebody at the problem site in order to use every facility of humanity to do the exploration. Having a human being on the Moon or on Mars is far more effective than just putting a rover there. People can improvise to solve problems and discover things that robots and science instruments simply cannot.

I don't buy either argument because of the current NASA program of the mars rovers. Spirit and Opportunity are a pair of robotic explorers that have been on Mars for almost three years now, driving across the surface of the planet, doing science and making discoveries. Unlike us, those rovers were designed to operate on Mars. They have limited senses, but their senses are good enough to provide science data for hundreds of engineers and scientists back here on Earth. They're on Mars now, for a combined cost of less than one billion dollars. In contrast, the manned program to Mars is looking to cost well over 100 billion dollars and won't be on Mars for at least another 14 years. When the robots develop a problem or encounter something new, a whole mess of engineers and scientists can combine their smarts to use whatever capabilities the rovers DO have to solve the problem. Humanity doesn't drop out of the loop just because we put a robot on Mars instead of a human being. We remain the explorers that we have always been.

Ultimately, I say that for now people should remain in the bubble that we were created for until we can figure out how to make new bubbles that will permit many people to go exploring. In the meantime, we should be creating robotic explorers for the environments that we are ill-suited for. This may smack of "If man was intended to fly, he would have been given wings." In response, I'd say that "If man was intended to go everywhere in person, the endoscope would never have been invented". Robots and sensors are needed to go where man is ill-suited to go. Let's push the envelope and create robots and sensors that will let everyone on Earth experience other worlds instead of moving the senses and abilities of just a few of us to those other worlds. However we improve robotics and sensors for other worlds, we will be improving them for our own world.

Look at computers. They've been reduced from the size of a room to the size of a paperback book with massive improvements in capacities and capabilities. Sensors are going the same route. Remember that problem of getting stuff up to speed so that we can go exploring? Our electronics are getting ever smaller, lighter and more capable, while our bodies remain unchanging with the same need for the bubble that we were designed for. When computers and sensors are down to the nanometer scale, we may find that we'll only have to get a couple pounds of electronics up to those really high speeds - instead of the tens of thousands of pounds required to have a bubble for a small crew of people. It just doesn't make sense to me to send people into space.