Maybe private interests are not the best way to compete in scientific discovery. Profit motive directly hinders discovery and safety.
Government-funded manned spaceflight programs aren’t done for pure science either. It’s a cool kids club where money is allocated for political reasons (“nation prestige” or some other bullshit). NASA didn’t land on the moon because American senators were fans of science, they were tasked with it to “beat” USSR.
Science-based space exploration should use automatic probes only, anything else is a waste of money.
That just sounds more like a culture issue than a scientific one. I agree with the other responder about fixing it without a government budget. But I also do not think we are anywhere near technologically advanced enough for availability to the public to really matter outside of maybe asteroid mining in the near future.
Manned scientific missions do matter. Especially for places with interest in human habitation. Those are few and far between for now but will matter at some point in time.
I agree to an extent, but I think this is a good start. We can’t go on forever with nested redundancy. It would be good to have the ability to troubleshoot and self repair in space. This kind of problem will push us toward breakdown/fix mentality that we’ll eventually need if we expect to get off the earth and stay off. Private may not be the best for scientific discovery, but figuring out how to do it without massive government funding will eventually bring it closer to the common person.
It’s hard to have a single direction in a government with elected officials especially when the goal is more ambiguous. Look at the Space Shuttle. Many issues could stem from its design by committee ( size requirements due to the DOD, etc). By most metrics it was neither efficient nor safe. And this will always be a weakness of government agencies as competing political agendas will intervene.
I wonder if the astronauts regret going up in the Boeing now.
