- Question
- Do we need manned space flights?
- Position‹2 of 3›
- No the complexity of space flights is too high
- Argument‹2 of 2
Still too many issues to be addressed with space flight
There are too many issues to be addressed from the technical & psichological issues
The argument
So far the only manned missions beyond Low Earth Orbit have been the Apollo missions, and the gap between what those demanded and what a mission further out would demand is the substance of this argument. A mission beyond Low Earth Orbit presents the issue of exposure to cosmic radiation, since the protection of the Van Allen belts is no longer present. Duration compounds the problem. Apollo missions had a duration of a dozen days, while a mission to Mars or other bodies of our planetary system requires, with current technology, several months of travel — which means both far longer exposure and an additional overhead in terms of supplies and oxygen simply to allow the astronauts to survive. Distance also removes the fallback that makes other crewed spaceflight tolerable. Unlike the ISS, if a problem arises there is almost no escape route. Even the comparison with Apollo 13 understates the difficulty: on such a mission every B-plan will still require months of voyage before it can bring anyone home, so an emergency cannot be resolved simply by abandoning the mission and returning. The destination adds further unsolved problems of its own. The atmosphere of Mars is much more hostile than the lunar one — wind-storms, for instance, have the potential to fatally damage a space-suit or a human habitat, which is one respect in which a mission to an asteroid might be easier. Nor is the return leg a solved problem: so far no human-made vehicle has ever taken off from Mars, so this poses the issue of re-entry with no flight experience behind it. And the psychological effect of such a journey, months of confinement with no possibility of retreat, should also be taken into account alongside the engineering. Taken together, on this view, too many issues remain to be addressed.
Context
In order to plan a manned space expedition there are a lot of challenges to be addressed both technoligical and psychological
Premises
Counter-arguments
Experience shows that in some cases a human presence on-board would have averted crash. Signal time-of-flight between probe and ground control (Earth) is in terms of minutes (20 min. for Mars). This makes time-critical operation such as lan ding impossible in real-time. As a result probe are required to be autonomous and this makes them extremely vulnerable in face of expected conditions and possible programming errors. In the famous Apollo 11 expedition Neil Armstrong had to over-ride on board computers to perform Lunar landing.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Each hazard listed is an engineering constraint rather than a demonstration of impossibility — shielding, consumables and abort planning are design problems — and the premise offers no threshold at which unsolved becomes unsolvable. [Rejecting P2] The Mars-specific difficulties argue against one destination rather than against crewed flight as such, as the argument itself concedes in noting an asteroid mission would be easier; the windstorm claim also overstates the force available in an atmosphere under a hundredth of Earth's pressure, and the psychological point is raised without reference to the long-duration station crews that would test it.