NASA Considers Ad Campaign To Persuade People to Care About NASA:
From the Associated Press:
Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA's new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to Mars, recent surveys show.Nothing like a government program to try to persuade people to support a government program.
Concerned about this lack of interest, NASA's image-makers are taking a hard look at how to win over the young generation -- media-saturated teens and 20-somethings growing up on YouTube and Google and largely indifferent to manned space flight.
"If you're going to do a space exploration program that lasts 40 years, if you just do the math, those are the guys that are going to carry the tax burden," said Mary Lynne Dittmar, president of a Houston company that surveyed young people about the space program.
. . .
At an October workshop attended by 80 NASA message spinners, young adults were right up there with Congress as the top two priorities for NASA's strategic communications efforts.
Tactics encouraged by the workshop included new forms of communication, such as podcasts and YouTube; enlisting support from celebrities, like actors David Duchovny ("X-Files") and Patrick Stewart ("Star Trek: The Next Generation"); forming partnerships with youth-oriented media such as MTV or sports events such as the Olympics and NASCAR; and developing brand placement in the movie industry.
Speaking as a member of that group, it has nothing to do with a government program. It has to do with the following:
a) NASA, in our memory (figure 1990 as a good date) hasn't done anything particularly impressive or inspiring.
b) We've all grown up watching Star Wars (which was old by the time we remember seeing it) and thinking of the Apollo program as ancient history. I'm aware, that's depressing. But when we see the Apollo program videos, and it looks like essentially nothing has changed, and then we watch Star Wars/Babylon 5/Firefly/Star Trek, we all wonder: why are we still using big clunky suits and sending 7 people up at a time?
Now, build me a Star Destroyer, and I'm definitely in with my tax dollars.
The problem, as I see it, is that space flight is much more costly and difficult than we imagined. My recollection is that as of 1970, NASA's plan was to have routine shuttles to space in the 70s, a permanent moon station in the 1980s, and trips to Mars in the 1990s. Instead, we're in the odd position of 35 years later of not being able to have routine shuttle service yet. And NASA won't even offer a price tag for what it is thinking, presumably because a trip to Mars would be in the trillions of dollars.
I agree with you generally (two of the three). However, once you decide you want an all volunteer military instead of the goverment showing up at your door and demanding your report for duty, I think advertising is probably a fair trade off (if not a requirement to make that deal work).
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I graduated from college just before NASA landed men on the Moon. Back then, given the science fiction movies that I grew up with, that would be the equivalent for today's college-age youths, of building the Starship Enterprise.
A Moon-colony is not only technologically feasible, but would probably be economically viable: You can do pretty amazing things in a low-gravity, high-vacuum environment and on the Moon energy from solar power is virtually unlimited. A base outside the Earth's gravity well is crucial if mankind is ever going to establish an off-world presence.
The biggest issue AISI is the idiotic treaties regarding the Moon that the US has been stupid enough to sign. These basically make free-market exploitatiion of the Moon's resources impossible. As long as that is the case, development on the Moon is of neccessity going to be government financed and run. A key question in the long term is whether or not the US government will be up there with the Chinese government.
The problem is that getting to the moon is a serious pain in the ass -- so much of a pain that we haven't sent anyone there in more than 20 years. So it may be that there is lots of free solar power there, but the power needed to get get the panels there and bring the power back drawfs the amount of power you could generate by several trillion trillion times. I don't see that as economically viable.
You are forgetting the transportation costs of any products you manufacture on the moon. Oh, and by the way, have you considered the sheer cost of just maintaining life on the moon. Everything, from air to water, would have to be manufactured from its constituent elements.
No treaties have prevented commercial exploration of space. It is simply not economically viable to go to space.
Can you imagine if Richard Branson had tried to obtain corporate funding from his own company for his X-prize project instead of his own money? It probably would have went something like this:
Sir Richard: "So that's it Gentleman, for about $20 million, I think we have a good chance of winning the X-prize. There are however, two other well-financed teams that have as good a chance, so time is of the essence.
Board Member: "You're saying, for a $20 million investment, we have a one in three chance of making a 50% return. That seems pretty risky"
SR: "I think you misunderstand, the prize is $10 million total, we still have to spend $20 million on the project."
BM (incredulous): "Are you mad man? At best your little project will lose $10 million!
SR: "But think of the long term potential. Think of all the people who will pay tens of thousands of dollars to take trips to space"
BM: "What, to experience weightlessness and throw up all over themselves. I don't even like roller coasters. You are quite deranged, you know."
Your ancestors probably told Columbus, "America? Why bother?" Such attitudes do not to human progress contribute.
I don't think anyone was planning to bring the power back. They plan to use it to live on the moon. You know, if a Mad Mullah gets ahold of a mutated virus, and starts spreaing it around so that the 12th Imam will come, those at the moon colonies may be the only humans left.
Again, nobody is talking about bringing manufactures back, the idea is to colonize the moon, then to colonize Mars, etc. Like when humanity started in Africa, or Eden or wherever, and colonized the Earth. It is our manifest destiny to spread our seed (IF we do not annihilate ourselves first), whether you think it is a good idea or not.
Mainfest Destiny says who? Kids today don't seem to think so, and you need their okay to foot the bill.
To look at it another way, if we don't colonize the moon, the Islamoonfascists might get there first. Once you've considered the notion of an interstellar caliphate, the crescent moon never looks so innocent again.
Before Patrick Stewart, or his future counterpart, can "engage" us into the future, we need some basic technologies developed. It's not terribly sexy to tell future taxpayers "hey guys, we want to build giant expensive trucks and buses to ferry people to the prefab city of the future to learn about growing potatoes in low-G." 98% of them yawned and cranked up their iPod long before you got to "giant".
You could hit it with an eco angle such as "When you are in your 40s the earth will have 8 billion people and there will be huge pressure to destroy the remaining natural lands to get at the minerals and build tomorrow's iPod with the spoils. Imagine mining minerals from asteroids instead." Nothing like a little fear, perhaps?
Although, if you really want to get at that generation, I think it's far more clever to convince them that *being* an an engineer or scientist is "cool" and that being part of the solution is a good way to spend their future. These days, kids learn that being "tough" is cool and "smart" gets you beat up during lunch.
Mars may be a different proposition. But, on the other hand, when we really start getting serious about Mars (two or three decades after colonizing the Moon) who knows what new technologies may be available to simplify the project.
If the US doesn't do it some other country will.
Let's accept that it is conceivable that some day we may be able to recover the energy spent getting mass into orbit when that mass comes back down from orbit.
What should we be spending our money on now? Certainly not manned space flight. NASA's biggest recent accomplishments are the Mars landers. Sojourner had the most popular website in the world for a while. The current Mars rover program, with two landers operating nonstop over a few years, cost less than a single shuttle mission to the useless space station.
The rover results and Hubble results make the news because at least some people are interested in the discoveries. The shuttle missions make the news because there are pretty good odds the astronauts will die.
Building a new space program that is a copy of the 1960's space program is just silly. We could get 100 times the utility out of unmanned missions for the same budget, and in the process learn a lot that may make future manned space flight more reasonable.
This isn't even in the same ballpark as the war on drugs advertisements. Despite what was said above I believe part of NASA's official mission is education and outreach and I've seen no allegations that these ads contain blatant falsehoods and they are considerably less invasive and worrisome than programs like DARE which cause great harm by simultaneously discouraging rational debate AND increasing drug usage.
However, while that's all nice in principle I think this particular ad blitz is deeply misguided. The reason that people aren't excited about these new missions isn't a failure to understand why they are important but a realization that they are nothing more than PR stunts themselves. Basically the public is finally catching on that (public) manned space exploration is a pointless waste of taxpayer dollars and going to the moon again or mars right now is just silly.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of space exploration/research but it is absolutely unconscionable to shove billions of dollars into the scientifically unimportant space station, the shuttle or trips to the moon/mars. Do you know how many hubbles we could have bought if we weren't wasting money on pointless manned space flight? Sooner or latter people were going to realize that NASA's involvement in manned space flight isn't really accomplishing much.
Of course someone is going to say but manned space flight has lots of spin off technologies. Sure it does but this is a fallacious argument that overlooks the opportunity cost. We don't have any shortage of basic science programs (space or otherwise) that could use the money from manned space exploration and they would spin off technology just as well as manned space flight. The argument for manned space flight back in the Apollo days was more convincing but with a huge portion of the cost now coming from tried and true technologies that are just reimplemented it is totally ridiculous.
At a fundamental level I agree with everyone who thinks we eventually need to establish human colonies on the moon and mars but the fundamental technology just isn't there yet. Frankly sending men into space now makes about as much sense as trying to explore the ocean with submarines back when everyone used steam power. First we need fundamental technological or economic breakthroughs to bring down the cost of reaching orbit then we can worry about sending people into space. NASA needs to focus it's efforts on producing these advancements (best done without human payloads) and not on the PR stunt of sending people into orbit.
Frankly ever since the shuttle program manned space exploration has been a PR stunt to get people to support NASA. Personally I'm quite glad that people seem more excited about things like Hubble and the rovers than putting men on mars. Maybe it means we can finally dispense with the pretense and just do the science part.
Friction and drag forces, unfortunately, are not conservative (but are they liberal?). There's far too much atmosphere to consider transport from the earth to the moon "free."
You're also assuming that you don't care what condition your elegant low-G produced moon products are in when they arrive at the surface of the earth. Sure, gravitational forces are conservative and we could easily and cheaply fling things from the surface of the moon to the earth. Of course they would hit the earth's surface as burning chunks of metal at several hundred to several thousand miles per hour (depending on their terminal velocity).
NASA is geared up for big, expensive manned flight. If the future is unmanned programs, NASA is going to shrink.
So you think we'll find gold and indigenes on Mars? Explorers of the New World (and their patrons) were looking for wealth. Perhaps you could tell me what wealth is to be found on Mars.
I think that the X-Prize competition last year made obvious the problems with government funded space flight. How can private enterprise get a craft into space twice w/i ten days at an entire cost a fraction of a single Shuttle flight, while a Shuttle takes months to turn around? I found it even more humorous that we have had to use Russian rockets to make the space station work as well as it does (which isn't all that well apparently).
Finally, a rational argument for space exploitation has been made for years now. What most of the scenerios I have seen require is that the Moon is first exploited. That will, of course, not be cheap. But it has a lot of advantages, including unlimited almost free power (in addition to solar, nuclear would also work quite well). Then, when the moon is self sustaining, it can be used to bootstrap orbital facilities (at, for example, the L4 and L5 Lagrange points). The theory is that since energy is essentially free on the Moon (and the Moon has a much smaller gravity well), that can be translated into getting material into space. The next step would be to get the orbital facilities self-sustaining. After all, in space, energy is again nearly free, there is no gravity well, and it is plausible that the constituants for living in space can be found there (such as asteroids containing water or iron). It works on paper - it just is out of reach financially - so far.
That would have been impressive, as it wasn't called "America" until 1507 at the earliest, well after Columbus ran into it. But the Yoda-like grammar of the sentence do I enjoy!
If NASA wants to capture the imagination of the public again, it's going to need something more substantive--and visionary--than an ad campaign. Something as far ahead of its time in 2006 as Kennedy's man-on-the-moon speech was in 1961. The space elevator concept is almost the only thing I've seen that comes close (though some of the things I've seen about that concept, if some of the tech blogs have any credibility at all, does give me a lot more hope for the future of mankind than any time spent reading political blogs, which tend to be depressing whether right or left these days).
Right now, NASA actually squirrels away its most futuristic research in NIAC (which is also a gem for aesthetic admirers of the beauty of the federal administrative state, as it is an acronym in which one of the letters itself stands for an acronym ... I stand in awe every time I even think of it ...); some of their funded studies are about as far afield as Apollo was in 1961, but these are small-scale projects, not major national priorities. (Bradley Edwards' space elevator concept was one of their studies, which you can see if you scroll down.)
The shuttle concept--blasting off into space strapped to giant phallic symbols filled with ginormous quantities of high explosive--was cool at the time, but its geek chic moment has passed, but NASA has been unimaginative in coming up with a suitable replacement and there are definitely some Congressmen who will fight to the end for the agency, so it endures.
Technology doesn't work that way. If you throw 1/4 gajillion bucks at AIDS, then you have funded one of the existing research rent seekers to continue plodding on his currently ineffective search path. As the "expert", he and his cronies will only aprve work that supports their own. Look at how Watson was skillfully milking the Human Genome Project as a 10 year ride for himself and the six largest members of the DNA research cartel until a disruptive technology arrived to make them actually complete it quickly...
The Apollo missions invented modern materials science and arguably created the modern computer (as oposed to the behemoths in the back room) - items that will never be placed as part of the NASA spread sheet. THe reason the shuttle does not much is that it is safe and not ambitious. Unmanned exploration everywhere would be even less ambitious.
The tragedy of the Shuttle accidents is not that they died; exploration is dangerous business. The tragedy of the Shuttle accidents is that they died for so little.
Nasa should be shut down and projects like this, if they must be done, should be subcontracted out.
Because the X-Prize competition didn't require that the vehicle can get into orbit, while the shuttle can go into orbit, and there's a drastic difference between achieving suborbital and orbital flights.
Heck, that would probably only take 40 years to break even economically!
Or we could take the same gajillion bucks and send sophisticated probes all over the solar system and beyond, and still have plenty left over to cure AIDS, put a dent in global warming, and all sorts of goodies back on earth.
There isn't enough money in NASA to harvest in order to pay for other "great things". $16 billion a year, in the grand scheme of things, is peanuts. Less than 1% of all Federal expenditures! Space is not even an especially large proportion of all Federal expenditures on R&D.
Good luck curing AIDS and global warming with NASA's $16bn a year. You might just as well expect the state of Georgia to cure AIDS and global warming - their annual budget is about $16bn a year, too.
Just a third voice pointing out that the analogy fails because we have a very good idea what is on the moon and on Mars already.
a) NASA, in our memory (figure 1990 as a good date) hasn't done anything particularly impressive or inspiring.
They kept me employed from 2002 to 2005. The first 'A' stands for Air. Besides Space, NASA is charged with Earth Science and advanced research for Air, including civilian aviation. The commercial airways are limited resources, especially at airports. I was working for a contractor developing proofs of concepts for air traffic control decision support tools with a timetable such that they would be demonstrated and handed over to the FAA for refactoring with a final rollout in the 2015 to 2020 timeframe.
Read Opening Statement by Rep. Sherwood Boehlert at House Science Committee Hearing on "NASA's Fiscal Year 2007 Budget Proposal" in February 2006 here.
Unfortunately (as the lead software engineer put it) President Bush decided that going to Mars is more important than going to Cleveland, and the contracts were cancelled. I don't know what happened, but apparently even the "civil servants" (direct NASA employees) were in danger of losing their jobs. On the contractor side, rather than do the work on spec (my former employer, a defense conglomerate, could have kept paying us out of petty cash) and selling the completed work to NASA when they restarted the program, they laid us off, dispersing a very effective team. I'm annoyed to have lost a great job, but there aren't that many software engineers who know air traffic operations (there aren't even all that many aeronautical engineers who know air traffic operations -- most of them go to school to learn how to build supersonic fighter jets) and when they do restart the program they're going to lose a lot of time rebuilding teams and training staff.
Here is the problem. An IT project with a development time-line of 13 years followed by a 5 year roll-out?
Perhaps just more important to a 13 year walk to Cleveland. This is a great example: Air Control Systems built relatively quickly to run on 1950's computer ca't be replaced in 3 times the man year on modern computers. It illustrates that unless NASA is doing great things, it does nothing at all.
Pretty uninspired choices, if you ask me. Duchovny's career is going nowhere fast and Stewart is way too old. My vote's for Jeri Ryan, ideally in her "7 of 9" outfit.
Just a third voice pointing out that the analogy fails because we have a very good idea what is on the moon and on Mars already." (David Chessler)
The analogy was dead on. It's beyond question that we know much about the moon and Mars, that is true; however, we must also acknowledge that whatever we know is far exceeded by what we don't know (Surely Rumsfeld would have stated this better). It's the unexpected discoveries on the moon, Mars, and the rest of the solar system that will advance human progress -- and we must surely go there. Plus, ICBMs on the dark side of the moon will greatly enhance our national security.
How can you figure the man-years without knowing the staffing?
I don't think CTAS is replacing anything so much as adding to it. A lot of ATC is seat-of-the-pants, and wetware (humans) are extremely good at that. Merging onto a busy freeway from a curved entrance ramp (if you're driving) or flying through a chain-link fence (if you're a sparrow) are very difficult problems in software.
I was involved in a lot of efforts where a couple of PhDs would study traffic patterns for a set of airports and analyze how much time and how much fuel would be saved if the controllers had kept the arriving aircraft out of conflict by adjusting their altitudes instead of their speeds, then they would write a paper and present it and get the go-ahead to then do the study at a different set of airports, or to calculate the savings if the controllers changed descent speed instead of cruise speed.
A lot of it is that milspec attitude where a $500 hammer is a $50 hammer plus $450 of paperwork to prove that it is a $500 hammer; and a lot of it is that until very recently the software was being written by aeronautical engineers not software engineers (somewhere around a million source lines of code the fact that you're still thinking in Fortran gets in the way of maintainability). But there are some gnarly problems in there, multiple bodies moving in 3-space at the same time, and relatively small improvements in efficiency can save millions of dollars in fuel.
The multi-year rollout involves proving that no routine is going to make people die in a fiery crash, and adapting the system to each airport, and getting the human controllers to use the tool, and taking their feedback to make it more usable, keeping the planes flying every day during that period.
There is always the triangle of "Quick - Cheap - Good -- choose any two."
Did you notice that nobody is sending ships across the ocean on voyages of discovery any more?
There's neat stuff up there, but we probably know more about Mars today than we knew about the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 or Alaska in 1867.
As for the technological boost, imagine how much Tang and Velcro we would have gotten if the same money spent for Apollo went to purer research. (I'll let the more geopolitical types address how much we got from the bragging rights and the can-do attitude that said "You may have gotten into orbit first, but we got to the Moon first.")
Constructing efficient, durable, self-contained, self-sustaining, "just add energy" mini-environments, on the other hand, is an unsolved problem that's equally important to the final goal, and whose solution would also have numerous terrestrial applications. Imagine, for example, solar-, wind- or geothermal-powered oil rigs, mining camps or manned monitoring stations in remote locations such as the middle of the ocean, desert or arctic/antarctic that never need to be resupplied except for the occasional emergency spare part. Imagine nuclear submarines that can go for years at a time surfacing only very briefly on occasion to rendez-vous with surface ships in random locations, to exchange crews and take on nuclear fuel and parts. Imagine large geothermal-powered seabed mining stations. The possibilities are endless.
Forget NASA--where's Biosphere III?
The real problem is a lack of innovation, ingenuity, and outside the box thinking. We had a man on the moon within 10 years of that goal. A pretty radical goal and a verified success! How much did those materials cost back in the 60's? Yet, it takes several years to build a adequate highway system for DC in the 21st century!! Can anyone see the problem?
Honestly, I think part of the problem is the way govt acts. There really is no incentive for someone to complete a govt contract on time (the Congressional Museum or Big Dig anyone?). But all the while, those contractors and subcontractors keep getting paid and their congressmen reap the benefit of their support/money/etc. But in the civilian world, results matter because otherwise you lose money. So, I agree to a degree with those who think that the private industry is the way to go.
Maybe it's just my conspiracy theory, but why hasn't someone invented a AA sized battery that last for a year? Don't tell me that it's impossible. But why should the battery makers come up with a battery that lasts so long that you won't need to buy anymore batteries? You know, if someone can come up with a hybrid space shuttle, we'd be in business!! Those are just some random thoughts, but it goes back to what I stated in the beginning of this rant... we need more innoviation, ingenuity, and outside the box thinking.
Anonymous Reader
Where do you get the idea that energy is nearly free on the moon and in space?
There is no air resistance on the moon or in space, but that does nothing to make energy "free."
Gravitational acceleration on the moon is about 1/6 what it is on earth, and in space, it is close to zero. But that has nothing to do with energy generation, and little to do with energy use.
Weight changes but mass (and inertia) remain the same.
Actually the first A stands for "Aeronautics".
Sheesh, haven't you read or seen The Right Stuff? A couple of billionaires achieved at considerable personal expense (they spent roughly $20 million to win $10 million) what NASA did regularly in the late '50s and early '60s with various aircraft, a couple of which are hanging from the rafters at the National Air and Space Museum.
I know NASA, I work with NASA folks on some areas of mutual interest. I have been impressed with the intelligence and dedication of each and every one of them. They hire some very bright people, and I assume you are one of them.
However. their timidity makes everything they do very much harder. The Milspec issue you cite is a small part of the problem. Incrimental changes w/o being able to replace the underlying Air Traffic systems is a bad way to go.
It isn't the people, It isn't the tasking. It is the smallness of the vision.
Would it surprise you to know that Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for those rovers, is very much in favor of a manned mission to Mars? And that he emphasized repeatedly in his book, "Roving Mars", that one man spending three days on Mars could do what took one of those rovers three years? And that robotic exploration is great, but only a precursor for the real explorers - men themselves?
Yes! Whoever thinks we "know" about the moon hasn't done their homework. We have rock samples from six sites on the moon, each no more than a couple square miles, representing a body that is larger than North America as a whole. Could you pick six sites that are representative of all the geologic history of North America? Mars is the same. We haven't even gotten a sample back from Mars yet - every bit of analyzing we've done has been with the stuff we've sent there. Not good enough.
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Older,
Yes, there is much we don't know about the moon and mars. All the more reason to do the most exploration we can with our dollars. Of course a manned mission will gather far more data per day than a robotic mission but for the same price as a manned mission we can send a huge number of robots that can spend years at their destination. Not to mention the fact that continued research into robotics combined with increases in processing power are continually improving the ability of robots to investigate and likely greater funding of robotic missions will further increase their ability.
It really doesn't matter what the PI of the rovers thinks. I would be much more interested to hear what the scientific community in general thinks about the relative dollar values. Moreover, without more context this fact is totally useless. There are tons of reasons one could favor a manned mission, only some of which cut against the arguments being made here. For instance it is certainly possible that he favors a manned mission because at the moment this is the only politically feasible way to get that much money poured into mars exploration even though using that sort of cash on robots would get us even more useful science.
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Look, every time we send people into space we spend tons of money on old proven technologies and materials. There is the cost to lift the food, water and air into space and all the other things crews need like restrooms. There is the cost of building and designing crew compartments, spacesuits and all sorts of other stuff. Back in the Apollo program when we were doing this for the first time we could learn a lot from doing this but now the technological benefits from these costs are quite small. In a robotic program a much larger portion of the cost goes into cutting edge tech which helps advance both spaceflight and terrestrial tech much more.
Worse basic decency requires we be very cautious when dealing with human spaceflight. In order to keep the crewmembers safe we have to esque trying new solutions and stick with the old ones we know will work. Backups and safety measures that aren't justified on a (scientific) cost/benefit analysis must be installed. Arguably this infects the whole agency with an over abundance of caution.
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Look, I think everyone agrees that back in the 1800s it would have been a mistake to spend huge sums of money to send things into space with the technology of the time. Perhaps they could have put together a truly colloquial gun powder or nitroglycerin based rocket but it would have been a much cheaper and faster route to the moon to invest this money in doing basic research in chemistry and physics and then using these results to more efficiently enter space. We are in a similar position now with manned space flight. The best long term way to get ourselves into space isn't to spend tons of money sending a few guys to mars but to do the more basic research on propulsion or space elevators that will later allow us to get many people into space efficiently.
It doesn't matter what an expert on mars thinks, because without data you assume his motives are suspect, but it DOES matter what the 'scientific community' thinks (who are not necessarily all experts on exploration), and their motives are NOT suspect.
One might postulate that since you DO apparently value expert testimony, that the only reason the PI "doesn't matter" is because he disagrees with you. You certainly don't provide any other reason.
As for the overall topic, I wonder if people who are lauding non-manned missions over manned ones are not making a very similar mistake to the one they accuse their opponents of: ignoring the merits of the other position simply because they are more fascinated by the gadgets than the boring, same-same humans v1.0.
Sure, you can fund a lot more missions using the gadgets, but going for maximum numbers of missions undertaken is no more a valid goal than going for maximum human involvement. The goal is to get the maximum useful knowledge and/or capabilities for the money, and I'd think that the gadget guys would be a lot more interested in the PI's "one man does the work of a horde of robots" idea if they were at all interested in results. Or does the team of robot jockeys sitting around for 3 years yanking joysticks on the gov't dime not 'count' towards the cost-benefit analysis because you choose not to see them?
WHen I lived in Massachusetts in the late '70s, the largest single buyer of radio time was the incessant "Have you played your number today?" jingle. It was noteworthy that the same jingle, appeared on billboards, and could be used as a metric on neighborhood health. The more signs, the worse the neighborhood. It probably matched the buying pattern you would use to market branded crack quite well.
There are a number of scientists who argue forcefully for manned space exploration. Here is one example.
Two wee, tiny little differences are that Burt Rutan's Spaceship One (a) didn't orbit the earth or (b) carry much payload. The shuttle orbits the earth and carries 3.4 buttloads of payload (that's a Southern unit of measurement there).
Okay, I lied, those are BIG differences.
Nobody is a bigger fan of Rutan and private spaceflight than I am. Heck, I'm building a homebuilt aircraft; Rutan is like a god to people engaging in that bizarre hobby. But comparing Spaceship One to the shuttle is apples and oranges. And I suspect Burt would agree with that assessment.
How much do they cost compared to the cost of rolling out the launch vehicle and then rolling it back because it looks like rain?
(A lot of what the robot jockeys are doing by remote control they would be doing with the Mars rocks that get brought back.)
I suppose I should spend $200 to fly to New York, instead of $100 for gas and other car expenses, because on the plane flight I get free peanuts, and when you're driving, there is never a flight attendant to give you free peanuts.
How much would a robotic mission (or a series of robotic missions, where you don't mind if many crash on impact) cost that would yield half a ton of moon rocks, especially if you leave the robots on the moon and just send the payload back?