re: #11 goddamnedfrank

BTW all this imaging and data acquisition was done with by SOHO, launched by an Atlas IIAS rocket in 1995. People like the idea that we need a manned space program because it’s romantic and they grew up thinking that having humans in space signaled some kind of accomplishment in and of itself. However the reality is that the real science now a days gets done by robots directed by scientists and engineers on the ground.

Why did men climb Everest when a robot could have just flown up there and planted a flag? Why send men to the Moon when robots had been there years earlier?