Anyway, I went through this a few years ago on HN after the Virgin Galactic accident. People argued that it was only a minor setback. Any setback that involves humans costs a lot of money and time.
Sending humans to Mars for even a 30-day mission would be orders of magnitude more science return than the entire robotic exploration program to date.
And that's without considering relativity time-lag. There's serious consideration of an orbital precursor mission to Mars that would put robotic handlers in Martian orbit, or a free-return trajectory near Mars, without a lander, to do little more than remote control a couple of Curiosity-style rovers that accompany them (and maybe visit one or both low-gravity martian moons). It's anticipated that the time-lag reduction alone could vastly increase the amount of science that could be done on a robotic mission before the nuclear batteries die or servos get clogged with dust.
And of course all the robotic arguments are predicated on basic science being the only reason to go in the first place. In reality, most of the people interested in Mars and space exploration generally want people to permanently settle in space. I actually don't give a damn whether there was once life on Mars.. but there damn well better be human societies there within my lifetime.
Yes, that's why I said we accelerate the research into robotics.
No one wants to fund NASA to go to Mars. It'll cost $200 billion to get a dozen people there, then it'll cost even more to stay.
The DoD can spend a few billion in R&D, and that's a small project. We can give tax credits for R&D to private industry. The research doesn't even go on the NASA budget.
I don't think you understand the scale of those requirements. It would be cheaper to send humans, even at absolutely ridiculous Apollo-on-steroid prices.
It's worth reading the whole speech: https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm
It ends with:
"Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."
There will as many robots as you want in space, but man will be out there right along with them, no matter how difficult or dangerous or expensive it is.
We reached the moon, spent a few years, then gave up because of cost.
Would you rather have a new robotic explorer, or two or three, queued for Mars, Titan, etc every year or a few people on Mars by 2040?
We don't know that, right? We don't know how much it would cost to develop the tech; we don't know how long it would take; we don't know how difficult it would be.
It might actually be cheaper to send canned apes throughout the solar system, than human minds in robot bodies; we just don't know yet. This is at best a Fermi problem, where we can start throwing numbers out and hope our estimates are within a few orders of magnitude.
The real problem is getting the money for space. No one wants to write a big check for Mars. They’ll write big checks for the Pentagon, automation in manufacturing, and strategic national goals.
The point is that robotics and other technologies are advancing extremely rapidly, but they're still not anywhere even remotely close to being able to compare to humans in general purpose functionality - let alone improvisation. Don't forget that those amazing videos of Atlas are the result of countless takes and on-site specialization. This [2] article describes the results of the most recent DARPA Robotics Challenge which featured all the big names, including Atlas. The competition included tasks like walking, opening a door, and climbing up stairs. The most ostensibly difficult would be navigating a specially modified vehicle after having humans carefully place and suspend their robot inside it. And the developers all knew ahead of time exactly what the tasks would be and the circumstance, except for one surprise task which ended up being pulling a lever. The long and short is that it was a disaster. Quoting the article:
"If there's a single lesson from the [DARPA Robotics Challenge], it's that humanoid robots are falling robots. Also, that the road to humanoids that aren't so clumsy will be long, and strewn with shattered components. If DARPA doesn't hold another version of the DRC, then the first one will have been little more than a grim status update, and a self-contained failure, for the few of us that realized it happened."
The point here is that we are a long ways away from robots that can remotely compare to humans for general purpose tasks. The timeline for getting to the Moon and even to Mars on the other hand is very near future.
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Beyond all this, space exploration is not just about science. Did you know China put a probe on the moon in 2013? Technically it was a rover, but back to those robotics problems - it became a probe. It was the first time anything had soft landed on the moon since 1976. If you did know this you're probably already a huge enthusiast in the field because the world collectively yawned, even though it made some groundbreaking discoveries including discovering the moon's geographic makeup was far different than we thought. That discovery is playing no minor role in driving the recent moon race.
But people want to see and discover space themselves. And there are lots of people willing to pay lots of money for the privilege. Two individuals have already purchased a Moon flyby from SpaceX - scheduled for next year. And even though a flyby is nothing compared to a soft landing, that will not be met with a yawn. Action requires money. Money requires public drive. Public drive requires manned operations.
[1] - http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2017/0906-cu...
[2] - https://www.popsci.com/darpa-robotics-challenge-was-bust-why...
That's a lot of cheaper robotic missions. If something breaks, there's another one in the works.
We should also be developing robots that can do what the human can do. That investment will pay off in many ways.
Btw, the first DARPA Grand Challenge was a bust in 2004. No one finished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge#2004_Gra...
That investment is absolutely worthwhile, but we aren't even vaguely close to a general-purpose robot that can do what humans do. One human geologist could do the work of an entire fleet of Curiosity rovers. It's a matter of if all of the associated dangers of space travel worth all of that scientific knowledge gained from both sending people to do interplanetary science and from developing new tech to get us there is worth it - IMO, the answer is a resounding 'yes'.
I bet we can get the money for better robots. It doesn't even need to come from NASA's budget. The DoD, private industry tax breaks, etc can pay for the research.
https://www.wired.com/story/atlas-robot-does-backflips-now/
If we lose a robot on Mars, not much changes.
My observation is that we can start immediately with attainable goals, at a cost we'll likely accept, with no risk of human life, and with immediate economic and technological benefits.
In the meantime, we've lost 4 years... with another decade more with no real goal.
My suggestion makes forward progress every year. At some point, sending humans to Mars, for example, becomes a small inexpensive step, rather than a giant costly leap.
We've invested many billions of dollars on robots already and this is the best we have. If we could spend $200bn to do he science in a few years that trillions dollars in R&D and probably the better part of century of iteration would take, why wouldn't we send humans up?
It seems crazy to me to throw money at robotics that work well on Mars when we are already investing billions and billions of dollars on robots here on earth that aren't even able to do the things that humans do.
That's not a lower bound. That's an upper bound on what hopeful NASA contractors think they can milk the government for in doing it The NASA Way.