Happy Birthday Yuri Gagarin

Nothing will stop us. The road to the stars is steep and dangerous. But we're not afraid . . . Space flights can't be stopped. This isn't the work of one man or even a group of men. It is a historical process which mankind is carrying out in accordance with the natural laws of human development.

Yuri Gagarin

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LeopoldBloom · M

Manned space flight is a waste of money. We should be launching robotic probes and space telescopes.

SW-User

@LeopoldBloom thank FSM we polluted the atmosphere, dropped spent rocket stages in the ocean, and/or left orbiting and non-orbital space junk (a Tesla? really? 🤦‍♀️) all in the name of space tourism, more metaphorical in the past, but now more literally with bored billionaires either creating the means (Musk/Branson/Bezos), or just looking for an open seat (Shuttleworth)

Our only consideration right now should be perfecting asteroid deflection (assuming that humans are a species actually worth saving) ... we have probably a hundred thousand years more to get off this planet before another extinction-level gamma ray burst, so we don't need to waste our time trying to make ourselves believe that totally inhospitable planets like Mars are our future and/or should be colonized at massive expense to overcome the immutable fact that Mars is totally inhospitable to humans, even though some salesmen may say "but look, there might be a thin layer of ice at the equator! isn't that marvelous?!" ... these salesmen cannot change the fact that Mars is still totally inhospitable to humans 🙄 Moreover a planet like Mars is still subject to all the limitations of a non-steerable body more or less stuck in the same place in space, should the need to move it arise (our star/sun growing too big in the future as part of the natural stellar life cycle? a rogue planet entering the solar system and completely upsetting the all the orbits of the other planets which are largely shaped by the gravity of Jupiter?)

We certainly don't need dick measuring contests between rival nations via the proxy of spaceflight

LeopoldBloom · M

@SW-User Exactly. I could add the Space Shuttle, a program that was monstrously wasteful both in money and human lives, whose only value as far as I can tell was to maintain interest in space exploration in general due to its popularity with the public. We've learned a lot more from robotic probes and space telescopes. Imagine if we'd tabled New Horizons and the James Webb telescope and sent humans to Mars instead. I'm disgusted that another manned moon mission is in the works when we could learn just as much at far lower cost by sending robots.