alt Hacker NewsI'd be very surprised if they're genuinely out of research ideas to test in space. If that is actually true then humanity has a problem.
>research that couldn't be done with automation
I'd think there is room for both. Automation makes sense, but don't think the versatility of meatbags is entirely there yet.
Replies
jfengel • today at 3:57 PM
Meatbags are versatile but really, really expensive. They require a really vast support system, and it has to be highly redundant because the cost of a loss is so high.
You can send up a lot of less versatile bots for the price of one meatbag.
> if they're genuinely out of research ideas to test in space
A bigger problem is lack of expertise. Astronauts are not specialist in whatever is the topic of the current experiment. You need probably like 5 years of training (assume the second half of the undergraduate degree, and perhaps the first half of the PhD). So experiments must be fully automated except for a button to turn they on and off.