Bill Graham wrote:
"Wolfgang Weisselberg" wrote in message

It isn't clear to me how I have ever profited from manned space exploration
in any way whatsoever to this day.

That's your problem. You haven't done your research, and only
you really know what's relevant to your life.

Obviously you expect something glamourous, when the reality is more
like 'occulation and sanitation' --- something done routinely which
has profound effects ... and isn't even thought about any more.

None of the TV/communication satellites
needed manned space shots......

Fact is that only manned space travel forced manrated rockets.
Manrating rockets will of course cause enormously increased
knowledge about the specific rockets and much of that knowledge can
be transferred to other rockets --- you don't have to start over at
zero each time.

Point: The Saturn V had twice engine failures. Because the same
Saturn V had an advanced computer it could not only compensate the
failures but could do so autonomously, recalculating and adjusting
the trajectory as it went --- and thus all starts were successfull.
This advanced computer had of course impacts on the advancement
of computers in general.

Point: The LEM had a couple computers as well, and their
capabilities were much increased over the lunar landings.
Of course the knowledge gained on building better, smaller
computers was not ignored for satellites.

I have always been more than willing to finance non-manned space
shots, both for exploration, as well as for practical things like
communication. It was only the manned stuff like Apollo that I
objected to, and I am still objecting to these, because we can still
learn 90% as much for 10% of the money with unmanned shots.

Sexual education movies can cover 90% for much less than 10%
what a baby costs --- and will not transmit diseases either.

Yet I've got the feeling the real thing is necessary for the
human race.

There may be some argument for using manned repairmen to service some
of the communications and optical equipment we have in orbit, but
even there, one could argue that it is probably cheaper to just build
another one and orbit it than to attempt to fix it on location.....

Hubble was an experiment designed to also test if repairing and
enhancing in orbit is feasible and worth the money. It turns out
it really needed fixing and taught us much about the processes,
even if it also turns out that replacing currently is often
cheaper.

Certainly this would be true were it not for the fact that the money
has already been spent to develop space suits and livable space
stations and the like, so we might as well use them.

The money for space suits is peanuts, and space station knowledge
will also serve us well when we'll settle on the ocean floors.
Given that the oceans have vast resources (though much much less
than asteroids offer) and that living space is going to be dear
if there will not be a *successfull* global (really *everyone*
involved global) change of the population curve.

-Wolfgang