Yes, humans make everything more complicated, but without them, there's not much point in doing anything.
Yes, humans make everything more complicated, but without them, there's not much point in doing anything.
There's a lot to yet to discover in space. Developing better tools, robots for example, to explore our solar system will also benefit us on earth. At some point the costs will drop and it will become safer, or we'll discover something valuable that we'll want to bring back.
If you look 100 years out, which route get use to having he most people in space? Let's release early and release often.
We must stop our collective procrastination. Human spaceflight is the ultimate forcing function.
Have you seen the type of landing solutions they're coming up with for the robots? They're all going in a direction driven by the realization that since they're not humans, they can afford to take far higher risks and subject them to stress that would otherwise be completely intolerable, so they're explicitly not trying to address the complexities of bringing humans into space.
I'm happy for work on robot probes to go on, but that's no reason to not also invest more resources in the groundwork for cheaper human space flight.
If we happen to discover something amazing that would be interesting or beneficial to walk up next to at incredible risk and expense, then perhaps we would do a manned mission. But its far far too limiting to send people in every direction to do the exploratory probing. You can explore a 1000x more volume of space with robots than you can with manned missions. We can't even see anything worth sending humans to with telescopes.
We don't make manned space probes for roughly the same reason we don't make manned torpedos. There's no point to the expense and risk. Use the right tool for the right job and put down the science fiction.