> A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same,
And the ideal of manned spaceflight should remain in the 60's - at least for the foreseeable future. We are magnificently evolved to inhabit this planet. The remainder of the solar system is insanely hostile to our form of life. It's far more sensible to engineer machines that can act as our eyes & ears and extend our narrowly evolved senses to far-out and lethal environments.
We're not all that great at swimming either, and yet building oceangoing boats and ships has turned out to be an important part of our technological development. Likewise air travel; we're only evolutionarily optimized for walking about on land, but have used technology to travel and transport goods over large distances on water and in the air.
Those are all fair points. But they don't really address my assertion:
1. I am not arguing that our evolutionary past should dictate where we explore. Rather, I'm arguing it must inform how we explore. Space travel is so lethal for our species that we are better off engineering machines, robots or beings that are specialized to operate in space.
2. The energy expenditure, economic cost and sheer distance of space exploration is many orders of magnitude beyond the costs of land, sea or air travel. Comparing terrestrial forms of travel to space exploration is disingenuous.
3. No endpoint. When the great explorers were trailblazing across the oceans there was a reasonable expectation of finding a suitable endpoint with fresh water, edible plants & animals, other people (!) and exploitable resources. With space exploration none of these things are present. We have to carry a suitable endpoint with us during the journey and plant it where ever we happen to land.
Expanding on that last point - imagine a specialized mars robotic explorer that goes on a one-way mission, taps in a sub-surface source of water, erects a basic greenhouse structure, goes into sleep mode for a few months, wakes up, plants some seeds, sleeps a while longer, etc. - it bootstraps a suitable endpoint for human explorers to inhabit years, decades or centuries later.
I agree with you on all these things, but subject to qualification. I think we need to be developing human spaceflight in parallel with robotic exploration, for the same reason that we don't do all our exploration on earth with telescopes. Air travel is orders of magnitude more difficult than sea travel, which is orders of magnitude more difficult than wandering about on land. I think there is no substitute for getting out there and attempting a wide variety of technological workarounds, notwithstanding the fact that many of these will be futile or fatal. The key plus for me of private or even semi-private space exploration is that failure or fatality won't mean a loss of political capital, compared to publicly-owned and managed space endeavors. Bluntly, we're more likely to discover better technologies if people are allowed to blow themselves up in the pursuit of same. On the last point, planetary colonization is one (remote) endpoint, if we can bootstrap it, but I think asteroid mining and the like also offers the potential of non-planetary habitation, which I find far more interesting. I remain optimistic about the possibility of other propulsive or spatial traversal methods, notwithstanding the limitations from our current theories of physics, though this is a statement about faith in technological progress rather than a specific hypothesis.
The same could be said for climbing mountains or racing cars at high speeds. The point isn't just to gain knowledge though, the point is to go, to do, to live.
And the ideal of manned spaceflight should remain in the 60's - at least for the foreseeable future. We are magnificently evolved to inhabit this planet. The remainder of the solar system is insanely hostile to our form of life. It's far more sensible to engineer machines that can act as our eyes & ears and extend our narrowly evolved senses to far-out and lethal environments.