Re: Why manned exploration of space?

Wayne Throop wrote:
:: I don't believe it would be impossible to repait the Hubble.

: Gutless Umbrella Carrying Sissy <taustinca@xxxxxxxxx>
: NASA did. That's why they took a lot longer to prepare for a manned
: mission, and spent a lot more money doing it.

NASA, of course, is well known for making decisions for rational/functional
reasons only, without any political, contractor, public image, or any
padding of budget for other that purely transperent motives.

And I mean, it wasn't like they had this, oh, call it a "shuttle",
on the shelf and lots of folks eager to use is whether it made the
most sense or not. Heavens knows is wasn't that.

And everybody knows no advanceds in robotics or telefactoring
have been made since.

If there's one thing working in robotics for a living teaches you, it's just how amazing *humans* are at doing stuff that robots, or telepresence systems, *suck* at mightily. I tried to do a BOTE-style analysis of what it would take to do the Hubble repairs robotically, based on my own experience and throwing in a hefty multiplier to take into account that NASA could get people *far* smarter than I am (Red Whittaker and Rodney Brooks, for example), and it's not a job I would have wanted to hang my career on. Not without an astronaut on hand to handle the nearly inevitable unforseen "oopsies."
Imagine trying to build a ship in a bottle via telepresence. Forget time lags, weird enviromental factors, etc, just a simple, straight forward highly-constrained space task. Imagine that you have *perfect* control of your robot down to within .001" (not going to happen, for various reasons, but I'm being generous). You have excellent stereo vision with zoom. You have all the time in the world -- your glue won't dry until you want it to, and then only the portions you *want* to dry will do so, and only in the way you want them to. Oh, and no limit on do-overs.
Have fun. I'll see you in fifty years or so. Now imagine adding on all the additional problems of a real-world repair job, and stack on that the issues of being in space.
There are tasks you can do robotically or remotely. There are things you *should* do that way. A Really Good (as in, beyond todays' state of the art) TP rig probably would have been very helpful to the Hubble RepairPersons[1]. But until you can build something as smart and versatile as R2D2, neither robotics nor TP are going to be able to do all the things, handle all the "oopsies," that a hands-on human being can.

[1] The Canadarm was a critical tool, but only grabbed the Hubble and held it close to the STS. It wasn't used for any actual "repair" work.
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