It was Carl Sagan who introduced the meme of robotic exploration being so much superior to crewed exploration. The unfortunate problem is that it is important to actually send researchers eventually to these locations or at least somewhat close to them for more timely and relevant scientific investigations. Some people are suggesting that artificial intelligence may be the key, but like nuclear fusion, warp drive, teleportation, and several science fiction concepts, artificial intelligence is always 30+ years away from actually being developed. It is much harder than it appears where computer scientists who predict silly notions of human like intelligence any time in my or your lifetime is just not facing reality.

No less than the lead investigator for the Mars Science Lab (aka the Curiosity rover) has openly stated he would gladly pay even a premium over the costs spent on that rover simply to have a few scientists there on Mars to perform the scientific studies there. I'll also point out the involvement of Harrison Schmitt who arguably performed more actual scientific studies and investigations outside of the Earth than all of the robotic missions combined. There is a very real need for human researchers in these places for actual space exploration to happen.

There is of course some very low hanging fruit, to use an analogy, that is easy to perform at the moment with robotic missions. In some ways you can legitimately point out that to send out these robotic missions in the short term is more valuable than sending crews, but that is a temporary situation that will eventually change. When doing budgets, it is reasonable to be perhaps even placing for right now emphasis on robotic missions. It should be with a purpose that eventually leads to crewed missions though... something that is definitely missing from those who advocate robotic missions alone.

Crews are going to be needed for actual exploration of space, not to mention that sending people to these places also captures the imagination of those pursuing scientific and engineering disciplines. It has been said "No bucks, no Buck Rodgers". I argue the opposite though, as a soulless spacecraft running around on Mars is not nearly as inspiring as somebody like Buzz Aldrin who can stare you straight in the face and tell you honestly that he has walked on another world. People like him were able to accomplish things that robotic missions could never do, not to mention it also pushed so many technologies to accomplish that huge goal of going into space and traveling to another world that it revolutionized society with consequences that still have yet to completely happen.

That is why we need to send people to Mars, to Europa, and to other places in the Solar System. They both inspire and create opportunities to make things happen. Huge goals like that will ultimately bless the lives of ordinary people here on the Earth in ways so profound that you can't possibly comprehend the end results from such activity. New ways of thinking, even new political systems as of yet undreamed will result from stuff like this happening. It is that basic to human existence, and why people must be included.... and it is downright silly to divorce crewed exploration of the solar system from robotic exploration. Both need to happen and they must co-exists for either kind of space exploration to be successful.

NASA isn't even planning on the first crewed flight until the year 2024. Yeah, I have faith in the U.S. government getting things right.

More like 30 years ago this should have been happening. Certainly a test flight like this should have happened some time within a couple of years after the loss of the Challenger. The singular failure of NASA to develop a system that will put people back into space has been an embarrassment for decades with dozens of systems that have been developed and even had "bent metal" like the Orion is right now. Yet except for the Shuttle, nothing has actually made the trip into space since Apollo. Even the Shuttle program had numerous set backs and budget cuts that nearly kept that from going into space.

Keep in mind, the Orion still hasn't gone into space, and the current configuration on a Delta Heavy isn't practical for anything other than possibly a mission to Low-Earth Orbit. I'm not even sure it can make the trip to the ISS with a crew with this configuration. When it is on the SLS, the ISS will never be a destination as there are no missions planned on that platform going there and certainly nothing funded by Congress.

For that, you need to ask if space exploration in general is something worth doing? Presuming that there is something worth doing in space at all, you need eventually to put a crew there.

A far more important question to ask about Orion though is if this particular is a practical method of travel into space in the first place? At a price of $1-$2 billion per flight, it seems there ought to be a much cheaper way to get people into space.

Robert Heinlein pointed this out quite some time ago with his book, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Space is the ultimate high ground where the Earth is at the bottom of a comparatively deep well.

There are things called lathes and other machine tools that can reproduce themselves. Without that capability, the Industrial Revolution would have never happened. The real question is how many of these kind of tools together with a good smelter do you need before you can be self-sufficient and keep making your own sets of tools out of raw materials?

This is a big deal because it would be nice to get a set of these kind of tools into the hands of people in 3rd world countries, or for that matter have a few of them cached in a bunch of random places on the off chance that our current technological civilization will collapse completely. It is also something important to know about if you are planning on building a colony on Mars or the Moon, as such a set of tools that make tools can help such colonies grow much easier.

Since everybody who has sent astronauts into space and routinely sends spaceships into space has nukes (except for Japan.... and nobody doubts they have the capability of building nukes), the treaties involving the legal status of objects in space has some real enforcement teeth. The question that needs to be asked though is if any country would be willing to start a global thermonuclear war over a sovereign claim made by another country?

You forgot a few parts of that treaty:

In other words, sovereign claims can still happen for stuff that is mined. You may not claim the whole Moon, but you can claim stuff you pull off of the Moon.

Another very important part of this treaty is this:

In other words, it is a paper tiger that is ultimately meaningless against any real sovereign claims. I think this provision will ultimately be invoked by some country when they try to make a substantial move to make a sovereign claim by actually going to the Moon or Mars... whatever country that might be.

A million dollars as ransom? Why such a paltry and pitiful amount of money? That isn't even worth having an FBI agent bother trying to find you in the first place, where you might as well simply demand a dollar if that is your threat.

Slowing down a vehicle constructed in space down to Low Earth Orbit velocities (actually reducing potential energy but it does increase in actual speed) from a higher orbit is much easier than sending it up from the Earth. You also have options of using extremely high ISP engines like ion thrust that may not have very high thurst but can be used for months or even years continuously.

Manufacturing spacecraft from a factory in space would be much easier to accomplish.... assuming that the factory is built in the first place. An O'Neil habitat would be a good way to make that work if you needed a crew, although that is quite a bit of infrastructure you would need to put into place in order to get that factory built in the first place. Once such a factory is built though, it would blow away any Earth-based satellite factories in terms of marginal cost to build more satellites.

Beyond helping the military test ICBM designs, what did NASA do that could help destroy the world? Any NASA mission or for that matter any USAF mission to redirect an asteroid would be detected months before it could cause any damage.

Or are you talking the Office of Planetary Protection? They are far more concerned about containing life here on the Earth than trying to do something that deliberately causes damage.

It is likely ITAR restrictions that keep SpaceX from seriously considering any activity in Australia. That is a really stupid law, but somehow trying to keep people in Congo, El Salvador, and Somalia from figuring out rocket technology seems to be a high priority right now. China just gets the stuff gift wrapped and sent to them in official communiques, and American companies are still trying to reverse engineer Russian equipment because it works better (in many cases)... so I really don't know who they are trying to prevent finding out all of this cool technology, but it would be illegal for SpaceX to do any tests outside of the USA.

One company that Australia ought to be seriously trying to court in terms of using a range like that is Firefly Space though. I don't know if Aussies think Kiwi millionaires are somebody to take seriously or not, but at least it is a bit closer to home.

The point about private spaceflight isn't who is building the spacecraft but rather who is footing the bills and owns the equipment afterward.

And no, spacecraft are not always operated by the government. In the past, it was companies like Boeing and Grumman who would build the vehicles, but it would be NASA employees who would fly them, fuel them, and take care of everything else once it left the factory. That started to change a little bit in the 1980's when the Reagan administration started to encourage more private contractors to run things at KSC and do other activities formerly done by NASA employees, and that trend has continued to even more depth.

One particular flight that had almost no government money involved, certainly no money from the U.S. government other than paying for the USAF personnel running the weather radars and opening clearance at the spaceport trying to keep others from getting hurt, was the launch last September by SpaceX to launch the AsiaSat satellite. That is commercial spaceflight, something you have apparently never heard of?

Commercial industry is doing stuff in space, and it is a multi-billion dollar per year industry. In fact, the launch part of the business is just a small fraction of that industry too. It is also a rapidly expanding market as well.

If battery replacement was so easy, why hasn't Tesla set up a network of battery replacement stations in Silicon Valley (much less anywhere else)? And to note that the Model S was even designed with the idea in mind that it could be replaced at such a station, but the company has pushed away from the concept in favor of high voltage recharging stations instead. I'm suggesting that such replacement stations are not economical even when you have a relatively high density of such vehicles in the area.

Why do you think Hydrogen is not safe? In terms of a similar quantity of energy stored as gasoline, Hydrogen is even safer than petroleum distillates in terms of a fuel, not to mention that tanks full of Hydrogen are usually better engineered as well.

Don't let the scare tactics of people who cite the Hindenberg zepplin disaster as justification for why Hydrogen is bad. You need to treat it with care, but you need to do that with all high density energy storage technologies of any kind and Hydrogen is pretty reasonable on the whole for that purpose.

On this I completely agree. The "Terra" episodes really started to push credibility, as did Count Iblis. I liked the series finale as it sort of suggested perhaps they might be going back to their roots again and hinted at some much better episodes in the future... that never came.