Anyway, we are all faced, or at least those of us who live in countries that have rocket ships all face, the question of personed vs. un-personed space flight as a way of doing science abroad and related quests. I’m not sure myself what I think about it, but considering the huge cost and difficulty, and the physical limitations, of using humans to run instruments on other planets or in space, and the sheer impossibility of human space missions really far away, the best approach is probably to use a lot of robots.

But wait, you say, a simple mission to Mars, by humans, would reinvigorate the space program, etc. etc. It might. But I strongly suspect that the cost of such a mission would reinvigorate budgets (which is, after all, what we are talking about) less than the extra cost, long term, because human society and culture has the memory of a star nosed shrew, on a good day.

And besides, “unmanned” space flight is cool. Very cool. Want to find out how cool it is? Check this out:

Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration describes the unmanned space missions that have opened new windows on distant worlds. Spanning four decades of dramatic advances in astronomy and planetary science, this book tells the story of eleven iconic exploratory missions and how they have fundamentally transformed our scientific and cultural perspectives on the universe and our place in it.

The journey begins with the Viking and Mars Exploration Rover missions to Mars, which paint a startling picture of a planet at the cusp of habitability. It then moves into the realm of the gas giants with the Voyager probes and Cassini’s ongoing exploration of the moons of Saturn. The Stardust probe’s dramatic round-trip encounter with a comet is brought vividly to life, as are the SOHO and Hipparcos missions to study the Sun and Milky Way. This stunningly illustrated book also explores how our view of the universe has been brought into sharp focus by NASA’s great observatories–Spitzer, Chandra, and Hubble–and how the WMAP mission has provided rare glimpses of the dawn of creation.

Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration reveals how these unmanned exploratory missions have redefined what it means to be the temporary tenants of a small planet in a vast cosmos.

This is a fantastic, much read book, and if you don’t read it, your opinion about manned vs. unmanned spaceflight would not be very well informed.

Burratti is a planetary astronomer at NASA’s JPL, and is the head of the Comets, Asteroids and Satellites Group. She was a key player in the Voyager program, and in the research done with the Cassini-Huygens, and New Horizons space ships.

Worlds Fantastic, Worlds Familiar: A Guided Tour of the Solar System is a personal exploration of what it is like to personally (via robots) explore our solar system, and at the same time, a systematic accounting of the solar system. The story is told, I think, as a geologist might tell it, about land forms and surface features. In other words, it is a somewhat finer scale look at the very big scale picture of the solar system, which is something that could not possibly have been done prior to the exploration of that solar system with these various flying robots. Which, Bonnie Buratti herself flew, directed, or otherwise played around with.

“It’s obvious what they need to do,” he was saying, and I could tell from the look on his face, even in my foggy state of mind, that a morsel of wisdom marinated in humor was about to be served up.

“They need Ross Perot.”

“Hrmph???,” I knew Mark (and everyone else I knew) was not a fan of Ross Perot, the independent can-do candidate for President that year.

Mark continued, “He would tell them ‘just send some guys in there and fix it‘”

I realized that Mark was referring to the fact that the space shuttle had just pulled up to Intelsat-6 satellite, a very expensive and apparently very important communications satellite (there were rumors that it was also a spy satellite or linked to the Star Wars program). The satellite had taken to spinning, and it was not supposed to be spinning. The Shuttle astronauts had brought with them a seven million dollar satellite-grabber device (the “Capture Bar”) which was designed to grab this particular satellite and cause it to stop spinning. After several attempts during numerous expensive and dangerous space walks, it was clear that this was not going to work.

“Like when Perot sees some problem, he just sends in a hit squad. NASA needs to tell the astronauts to get get out there and grab the damn thing and make it stop moving.”

Mark is a very smart guy. You may recall that after the unsuccessful attempts at using the capture bar on that satellite, NASA did in fact send the astronauts out there to just grab the damn thing and make it stop moving. And they did and it did. And none of the astronauts went flying off into outer space.

I was reminded of that when I saw the film of the Shuttle team trying to unscrew a bolt holding a camera in place in the Hubble. They were trying and trying and trying, and finally, this guy who in his spare time fixes old cars twisted the damn thing off and they were home free.

Achenblog has an interesting post describing why it took so damn long to get the freakin’ bolt to freakin’ untwist: The astronauts are not allowed to curse.

Certain words act like WD-40. I cannot specify them in a family blog.

But astronauts, being heroes, are merely permitted to use incomprehensible jargon and astronaut-words like “egress.” They are not allowed to utter the very easily understood words that are deemed to be obscenities.

If those astronauts on Thursday had not been miked and live-streamed on NASA TV, I guarantee you the dialogue out there in the payload bay would have been something like this:

And then he goes on to provide details.

Which reminds me of a (very short) story.

When Julia was little, but verbal, something of hers broke and she brought it to me. She was never a kid to cry and get upset when something broke, or when she could not have something she liked. She was always very pragmatic about such things. So she brought me this toy, which was broken, and said:

“Daddy. Can you say ‘damn-damn-damn’ and make it work?”