re: #53 Occasional Reader

Because it’s there, dude.

True; manned space missions are cool. But in terms of bang for the buck, where bang is measured in information retrieved, unmanned missions outperform manned missions by a couple orders of magnitude.

In addition to the huge advances made in those areas, there’s also the quieter advancement in engineering practices that have made it possible to almost completely repurpose spacecraft that have had components fail en route. Missions that would have been deemed complete failures just a few years earlier have been salvaged through some really remarkable engineering feats and wound up returning nearly as much data as originally planned, despite major systems failures.