Spencer's article rightly asserts (aren't we getting tired of hearing this yet?) that the Constellation program, which was the umbrella of funding under which former President Bush's return to the moon plan was funded, was doomed from the start. He then doggedly references the Augustine Committee, a group I have referenced here before, and their report that funding for the Moon Mission must increase by billions of dollars if success is to be achieved. This was correct then, and still is.
But as a serious proponent of unmanned space exploration, I was perturbed by Spencer's assessment of robots:
Is manned space exploration important? Yes – not least because it simply works much better than sending robots. When you look past the rhetoric and superstitions and compare the results, today's robots (and tomorrow's too) are pitifully limited, painfully slow, and not really all that cheap. (Case in point – NASA recently gave up trying to free the Mars rover Spirit from a sand pit it had been stuck in for nine months. But when the Apollo 15 crew's lunar rover got bogged down in loose soil, the astronauts got off, picked it up, moved it, got back on, and drove away – all in maybe two minutes. Robots do fine when everything goes as planned, but that's rarely true on complex, poorly-known planetary surfaces.)The implication here is that it is the fault of the rover Spirit that it became bogged down in a sand trap, not the fault of the human scientists on Earth who potentially did a poor job navigating it. And of course, a lunar rover piloted by a human that got stuck on the Moon proves robots are inept...even though the lunar rover was neither a robot, nor controlled by one.
Spencer appears to be arguing that robots are ludicrous, clunky automatons like this, unable to flit from rock to rock unlike their boy-genius creators.
In reality, robots are now so seamlessly functioning in our everyday lives that we don't even realize they are there. Every single electronic device you own had a printed circuit board that was fabricated in a factory by a team of robots...the traces are created, the individual components are precisely located on the board, and the soldering is done with almost zero errors. Even the processors in your computer, with millions and millions of tiny junctions, is built by a robot. You can now import a 3D model into a 5-axis CNC machine, and after a few minutes and a couple key strokes, you can go sip coffee and complain about the size of your paycheck while the robotic machine will build your part, accurate to the ten-thousandth of an inch. Clearly robots are not pitifully limited or painfully slow.
But maybe I shouldn't judge robots based on their earthling counterparts, and instead I should judge the state-of-the-art in extraterrestrial robots. Spencer chides the Martian rover Spirit, lost to eternity in a sandy quagmire. But he does not mention that Spirit's mission was designed to be only 90 Earth days long, yet Spirit continued to pluck about the Martian landscape for 5 years and three months, which was about 21 times longer than the rover was designed to drive. Imagine if we sent humans to Mars, then kept them there that long because their mission was going well. Nor does Spencer mention that despite being hopelessly stuck in the sand, Spirit continues to gather scientific data and send it back to Earth. A little robot, designed to dig a hole in a couple rocks and look for water/fossils has exceeded every expectation of it. But let's remember it for where it finally came to rest, and call the result a failure of robotics.
And lest we forget...the other rover on Mars, Opportunity, is still driving around...having survived a year of dust storms in 2007, exceeded its 90-day mission life by 6 years, and traveling 20 miles across a desolate, rocky wasteland.
And I hate to mention Voyager 1, because it was a "satellite" and not necessarily a "robot" per se...but a satellite sent in 1977 to study Jupiter has now studied the entire outer solar system, and is the most distant human-made object in the galaxy, still doggedly sending data back to Earth on the heliosheath, the termination shock, and is expected to continue running until around 2025, nearly 50 years after it was launched.
No, Mr. Spencer, robots are not able to problem solve like humans can. But we sent a 400 lb. robot to Mars and it worked for 6 years with literally no supplies sent with it, or sent to it after it arrived. Could a human do that? Should a human do that? Why bother sending humans to explore other planets or stars, at the cost of billions, when we can send hundreds of robots instead, at a cost of mere millions?
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