People can take initiatives on a completely unknown environment way better than our best computers can, including fixing things. That's a reason manned space stations are so useful, you can launch an experiment up there and know than there are smart people who will make things work even if you forgot some minor details. It is even more important the further you go, as latency increases.
In addition, manned space exploration tells us valuable information about ourselves. About our bodies, our mind. It may lead to valuable medical discoveries. And of course, at some point we will want to go there in person, from long term goals like space colonization to simple curiosity, and these are the things we need to know.
And I don't think manned space exploration held back anything. Manned exploration is inspiring, and Apollo was an important political move, it means lots of funding. Pictures of outer space clearly don't have the same impact. It is easy to see, for the decades where no one considered manned space exploration, not much happened compared to what happened in the 70s, including on the unmanned side, simply because of shrinking budgets due to the lack of interest. Yes, we did stuff, but Voyager, Venera, Hubble, Pioneer, etc... all in the 60s and 70s.
If you didn’t have human Spaceflight you’d get the budget for gps, military, and maybe weather satellites and not a whole lot else.
We should focus on building digital bodies to house our children.
Our species in its current form dies with this gravity well. We're evolved to and fit it like a glove.
It's our minds that will see the universe.
Being realistic is one thing but completely giving up on pushing out the frontier of our capabilities is shameful IMO. Literally mailing it in isn't a substitute for space travel.
We carried the seeds of our civilization to new continents which carry our gas mixture, food resources, temperature, gravity, and a million other parameters that the human body plan needs. The destinations were completely hospitable.
Good luck in space. It is beyond hostile and offers nothing for our survival. Also, there's really no economic reason to go there.
Space belongs to the robots.
1) Access the vast resources available elsewhere in the Solar System.
2) Move most polluting and destructive heavy industry off of Earth (this will take big advances in propulsion technology).
3) Provide good habitats for humans and ideally much of Earth's ecosphere elsewhere in the Solar System. Certainly the human population alone could rise to the hundreds of billions if desired/needed.
Surely it'll take a lot of progress to achieve those goals, but they're within reach of our current scientific knowledge. Interstellar travel, on the other hand, is much more of a stretch goal! ;-)
This is NASA's language: https://www.nasa.gov/reference/jsc-crewed-spacecraft/
I'm more of a massive spinning space station made from asteroid/lunar mined materials kind of guy myself.
But if harebrained ideas to colonize a body with substantially lower gravity that may no idea if the human body is even compatible with that lower gravity get us the infrastructure needed to get lots of stuff into space then so be it.
What do you think is the biggest part of the transport costs and why in your opinion can it not be reduced?