Luckily, there IS something worth bringing back: Platinum. Take one small asteroid of the right type, refine out the platinum and you have some $30B worth back on Earth. Check out http://spacewealth.org/

There’s an awful lot of steps to take to find the right few asteroids, but they are all now feasible.
The right role for NASA is to act as an enabler for space resource development, just as the US Government did opening up the West after the Civil War.

Mining asteroids will be robotic, at first. But once a large enough infrastructure has built up, it will need people to service it efficiently, and we’ll be back in space and have the capability to go to Mars cheaply.

One interesting aspect of this report is the absence of science. Out of 12 pages, science is mentioned twice.

They’re preparing the scientific report, see here.

But seriously: What does the research say about space exploration and public perceptions of science? My guess is that a large majority of people – politicians too, probably – sort astronomy, space science and manned spaceflight in the same box. Marked ‘SPACE’. Maybe that’s NASA’s fault, of course, but I don’t think that can be the whole story.

Sure,not dollar for dollar, but 60 or 70 or 80 cents on the dollar, absolutely. After all, it’s the same agency doing both, no?

I have no problem with Orion going to L2, which is easily within its capabilities, but Orion can’t be JUSTIFIED by this consideration. Add in sample and return mission to NEOs and the start of learning how to bootstrap our way out of LEO, and I’d vote for it.

I think the answer is nanotechnology. We have carbon nanotubes which are great but a bit too short to reach the orbit. What we need are nanomachines capable of sorting and “welding” nanotubes together so they can be woven into cables of arbitrary length. This is certainly not easy but I’m pretty sure it’s doable within a 10 year time frame.

More likely, space science funding would be cut to the level of oceanography. There would be no Fermi, no HST, no Spitzer, no JWST, no Kepler, etc. Without manned flight NASA’s funding would go to zero.

Even for us science fiction fans, there is far more payoff from unmanned missions. Measured strictly in terms of coolness, does anyone really think a manned mission to Mars beats a space telescope capable of direct observations of extrasolar planets?

We could well have direct evidence of alien life, even civilizations, within our lifetime — but not if the “pro-space exploration” people get their way.

I agree with most of what you say. It is indeed a false belief of many that money taken from human spaceflight will neatly show up in the science column. Your citation of JWST as a non-serviceable probe, however, raises many interesting issues. All on its own, the development of JWST has taken much time and large sums of money. Indeed, while JWST is a true space telescope, unlike HST, which at least bears a resemblance to a ground telescope with a spacecraft wrapped around it, I see no great relative economies in its development. If it fails on launch, that will be that – we will not quickly bang together another one and pat ourselves on the back that we could do this by avoiding the burden of making it serviceable. I should note that shortly before Lyman Spitzer passed away, he was very much engaged in trying to make JWST L2 serviceable. Indeed, given the investment that we are making in science at L2, it’s a pity that we have not been able to do this in parallel with a human capability there, although there have been no shortage of advocates for this.

I cannot resist one further reflection on JWST. It is named after James Webb, without dispute the greatest of all the NASA admins. I have heard him dismissed by astronomers born after Apollo as “some NASA bean counter.” In fact it was Webb – on his own! – who realized that NASA should strongly support space science. He actively reached out to the astronomical community, who in the early 60s were not thinking of NASA as a source of support. Webb was an advocate of a balanced program in which space science rode along with and benefited from human spaceflight. Perhaps we could flourish in some future configuration in which the two are cleanly divorced, but we should not forget how we got to where we are today.

The explorers of old were motivated by profit, not from any “because it’s there” sense of adventure. They were searching for easy routes to the orient to gain a competitive advantage over other countries. Colonization was not the goal, at least not initially (but even colonization was profit-oriented). If manned space flight had such a profit motive, we’d probably be doing it. But so far, it’s money in, no money out.

From all accounts, the sun will be a reliable source of light and heat for another few billion years so I don’t think we need to hurry. But I do agree that eventually humans need to venture beyond earth, so we do need to continue research into more efficient and cost-effective ways to do it. But I don’t see the need to spend a large percentage of the national budget to go to Mars “just because we can”.

yeah, going to mars is arguably the modern form of building pyramids. and we all agree, that pyramids are just a useless pile of rubble that nobody in their right mind would pay any attention to, correct?

let’s be serious, let’s talk bussiness. let imagination not get into our way. after all, what are we humans made for than grinding away our daily affairs?

oh, btw: the report i find very sensible. it clearly states that without a budget human spaceflight should better be abandoned. and also it gives the ares 1/5 concept a well deserved bashing. what else did you expect from a commission about the future of human spaceflight?

“Mary Ann Cramer: Is it worth it? Should we just pull back? Forget the whole thing as a bad idea, and take care of our own problems, at home.

Sinclair: No. We have to stay here. And there’s a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you’ll get ten different answers, but there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us. It’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes…[and] all of this…all of this…was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.”

To me, this isn’t just about what we can accomplish right now, what we can bring back this instant (even though we can in fact do a lot). What we are doing when we send people into space is doing more then kicking up moon dust, or being a symbol of how much cooler we are then the Soviet Union. It’s about the long-term survival of our entire species. When ancient peoples first built ships to sail the waters, they couldn’t go to America, nor did they try. If they had they would have either died en route or been able to do little but kick up dust. Over THOUSANDS of years, ships evolved, until we were able to go out and discover the Americas, benefit from the resources. If we don’t try, if we sit here and scratch our heads trying to figure out how to build mars colonies without trying to reach mars, what have we accomplished? We have to give it a shot, because literally, at some point, the survival of the human race as a whole is on the line.

Yes, I have a tendency to think too long-term in everything, but panicking at the last minute because earth is REALLY unable to support us anymore seems like a bad idea in general. We can spend billions blowing stuff up in Iraq, but not to help insure the survival of our species. We’re geniuses aren’t we?