re: #22 aagcobb

This is a reason I prefer robotic exploration of space to human. Robots can go places humans never will, at a fraction of the cost, and if one of them is lost, its a shame but not a tragedy.

Saying that there are places humans will never go sort of sells short the ingenuity of humanity. We’ve explored the peaks of the highest mountains and sent manned vessels to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. We’ve cracked the sound barrier, sent men to the surface of our own moon and returned them safely, and begun establishing a foothold in planetary orbit.

And “fraction of the cost” is misleading because a single robotic exploration satellite or rover can still be an investment of years and millions to billions of dollars. It’s actually a large part of the reason that NASA has had a hard time justifying its budget requests time and again, because the success/failure rate is rather troubling when you consider that (for example) 2/3 of all missions sent to Mars have ended in failure. You can have scientists spend the better part of their careers planning, designing, constructing, and launching a mission only to see it end in failure because somewhere along the way a tech forgot to program the computer to accept measurements in metric rather than imperial units.