“Plus my sympathies to those involved in Spitzer mission, all good things must come to an end, I guess.How long then does Spitzer have left and what happens when it’s mission finally concludess – will it be de-orbited, boosted into a higher graveyard orbit or what?

Thanks for the images, science and memories you’ve delivered Spitzer – you were great. One of the great space telescopes / observatories indeed. ”

…wait, what? Why the pity party for Spitzer?

A bit of background here. Spitzer’s big solar panel array also acts as a large sun shield to keep the telescope assembly cool. We enforce roll and pitch limits to keep the telescope behind the sun shield, as well as to keep the solar arrays pointed at the sun to generate enough power to run the telescope and avoid eating into the batteries too much. Spitzer’s in an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit, and is slowly drifting away from Earth (we hit 1 AU the Saturday after Thanksgiving). As we move further away, our data rates will decrease due to the distance involved, and we have to pitch over farther to get our high-gain antenna – which is fixed at the “bottom” end of the observatory – pointed at Earth to communicate.

It turns out that in Fall of 2013, the pitch angle we need to point the antenna at Earth will exceed those angle limits I mentioned earlier. When we were approved for extended mission after cryo depletion, this was thought to be a hard stop, an unavoidable end to the mission. We’ve been doing analysis over the last couple of years, and it turns out that it’s not the hard stop we thought it was…we can exceed the pitch angle limit long enough to communicate.

…so yeah, this is a huge win for us! We’ve been extended past the point where nobody thought we’d be able to survive! Sure, we’ve got some challenges ahead, but we’re finding that they’re not insurmountable, they just require some changes in how we fly the telescope. Don’t start writing our eulogy yet, either…as the review says, we go up for review again in 2014.

And quality. Robotic missions had scrapped gravel from surface. Human missions had everything: small rocks, large rocks, dust, core samples… all carefully selected and handpicked from wide area (especially in later missions with rovers).

Here is a link to Prof. Weinberg’s article which I will link to again.

This is not what I asked for.

I asked (#16) if you had a link to any writing where Weinberg justifies his out-of-hand dismissal of the inspirational value of manned space exploration.

You have instead linked to an attack on the ISS (which, incidentally, I mostly agree with – but the ISS has nothing whatever to do with manned space exploration, except tangentially in the “learning to live in zero-gee” sense).

Shuttle and the ISS are not Apollo. They have their own achievements, and I am sure that the people invovled in designing and performing experiments on the ISS would argue against his unsupported contention that “Nothing of scientific importance has come from the space station”, but Shuttle and the ISS were not in the business of exploration.

Since the article you linked to is nothing but an opinion unsupported by facts, it amounts to nothing more than an appeal to authority. But Weinberg is an authority on particle physics, not space exploration, so his opinion is no more or less valid than anyone else’s.

Google is your friend.

Maybe so, but when you make a claim or a contention, then it is your task to support that claim or contention unless it is, for instance, a widely-accepted facet of mainstream science that will be in textbooks and so on. It is far from established that manned exploration of space gives less value than robotic exploration. If you want to claim that this is the case, it is up to you to support your argument.

Can you?

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1037/1

Just to show that I don’t think that Prof. Weinberg is god, I don’t agree that Mars is the best chance for extra-terrestrial life in the solar system. IMHO, Europa is a better bet.

Apollo occurred back in the 1960s when robotics technology was in its infancy.

Did you miss the part in #20 where Torbjörn Larsson, OM, presented a précis of a paper that compared Apollo to modern robotic missions?

Perhaps you should go back and actually read the post, yeah?

Or was the problem instead with your comprehension of Torbjörn’s point?

Seriously, there is no excuse for completely ignoring a point someone has made that blows your contention out of the water.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM (20) said:

The Apollo missions are instructive in this respect. … It is interesting to compare this with the cost of a modern state-of-the-art robotic mission, like Mars Science Laboratory.”

Your counter-argument fails before you even typed it.

Back to SLC (29) :

Today, the same science could be performed by unmanned missions at far lower cost.

Probably not, actually. Do you know much about the science that Apollo did? It is very likely (as in, almost a certainty) that a robotic mission, using today’s technology, would have missed both the “Genesis” rock and the orange regolith that were serendipitously spotted by Apollo astronauts. Never mind the fact that even a modern rover such as MSL would not have been able to reach some of the sites from which Apollo astronauts returned samples.

Apollo occurred back in the 1960s when robotics technology was in its infancy. Today, the same science could be performed by unmanned missions at far lower cost.

Here is a link to Prof. Weinberg’s article which I will link to again. Google is your friend.

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/weinberg-ending-manned-space-flight-is-the-right-216386.html

Re Torbjörn Larsson @ #20

Does Mr. Larsson have any conception as to what a manned space mission to, say, Europa, would cost or whether such a mission is even doable for humans? Or even a manned space mission to Mars? For instance, how would Mr. Larsson sustain astronauts during a 1.5 year journey to Mars, not to mention a 1.5 year return trip?

First off, would it hurt you so much to adopt the second-person form of address, rather than addressing other commenters in the third person?

Second, you are ignoring the point that Torbjörn Larsson, OM, actually made. Don’t shift the goalposts by adressing only missions yet to happen. The point that Torbjörn made in #20 is that the evidence available so far indicates that manned exploration is more cost-effective than unmanned. If you disagree, say so and then explain why. In detail.

Third, the challenges involved in a manned mission to Mars or Europa are immense. But they are engineering challenges. The problems are reasonably well understood. With the right tools and expertise we can overcome them.

Re Nigel Depledge @ #22

As to a link to an extended article by Prof. Weinberg, I once linked in an earlier thread on this blog to an article he wrote for the local Austin, Tx. newspaper, which explained his position at some length.

This was not what I asked in my comment #22, it was what I asked in #16.

And it is of no use in supporting your contention here. I’m not going to spend hours trawling through previous blog posts trying to find a comment in which you linked to Weinberg’s article. You are the one who implies that Weinberg’s opinion is relevant, so you come up with the goods to back it up.

Now, do you have any intention of actually adressing what I said in #22?

Also, Bob Park, has written numerous comments on his web site justifying he position on manned space flight.

So what?

Are you trying to make an argument from authority here? Bob Park is just as capable of being wrong as you or I or Weinberg.

If you have a cogent and persuasive argument, then make it.

The fact that you have not implies that you do not have one. Of course, it is easy to prove me wrong here. Simply make your argument.

It is a mistake to conclude that Park and Weinberg are opposed to space exploration.

Who said they were? Certainly not I.

They are enthusiastically in favor of it.

So what? That doesn’t make them right about it.

Their views about manned space exploration are based on the dearth of scientific progress made so far in that program

What dearth of scientific progress?

Apollo achieved some extremely good science. The Shuttle programme was not one of space exploration. Microgravity science was an add-on to Shuttle, not its purpose. If you compare robotic explorers with Shuttle, then of course the robotic explorers will win, because Shuttle was not in the game of exploration.

and their view that robotic missions can perform the same missions at far lower cost, contrary to the conclusions reached in the papers cited by Mr. Larsson.

Yes, we gathered that Weinberg’s opinion is contrary to the conclusions in the paper cited in #20. This is kind-of obvious, since the paper cited in #20 actually refutes Weinberg’s opinion. Larsson’s cited paper uses something that you have not used – facts. And fact trumps opinion every single time.

So, if you have any facts that support your argument, let’s hear them. Otherwise, stop treating Weinberg as some kind of infallible prophet and stop whining about manned space exploration.