re: #58 SixDegrees

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.

The one thing a human can do that these machines can’t is to change the experiments.
If we had people and a lab on Mars, the Viking lander’s ambiguous results would no longer be ambiguous.

And the other reason is to go there. Space is not just for research; we need to expand there as well.

Finally, I ask people who think robotic exploration is sufficient, if they’re willing to take their next vacation by controlling a robot over the web at their destination.