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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

I didn't say ban manned space flight. We keep trying to restart our space program by sending people to Mars. I think we should start a more extensive national unmanned space program. For example, if the Hubble, or its replacement, needs to be fixed, we should have an unmanned answer, for instance.

We should start building on Mars without humans. If our machines can't do that yet, then we should invest in them until they can.

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I guarantee you that if there was sufficient profit motive, you'd see hundreds of companies being formed to go to space.

Right now the risk makes it too expensive, so the profit isn't there. Much of the work Virgin Galactic and the others are doing will lower the cost eventually. When it gets low enough, there will be people lining up around the block to become asteroid miners, etc.

Lack of willing people will never be a problem.

One potential benefit of developing the automated solution is that life support is HEAVY. You can send up much larger payloads when you don't have to worry about keeping humans alive.

Not to say that there aren't large drawbacks (huge amounts of R&D, for example). Robot space travelers are also relatively uninspiring.

Are you suggesting we send several generations of robots to Mars first? That's a great idea and exactly what we have been doing for decades.

Yeah, didn't we land something there a decade ago? And the decade before that?

And four decades ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program

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