Re: More USS Gravy Train than USS Enterprise
> If the goal is a permanent foothold in space - i.e., colonization - then robots have yet to equal humanity at making babies. ;)
The important part there is the *if* at the start of your sentence.
Colonization has to have a purpose - typically (1) a need for more space to grow population or (2) acquiring an environment or resource you can't get more cheaply elsewhere, while at the same time needing (3) not getting cooked and DNA scrambled in the attempt.
Inside the solar system, what's the point? Camping half a dozen astronauts on Mars doesn't have such a purpose. No solar body other than Earth really works for (1), and we've yet to find any evidence of a resource which meets criteria (2). Even if you found something dense and expensive, say a ton of pure platinum, it's only worth $24 million at today's prices. If you actually managed to find and haul back 100 tons of it (good luck getting that out of the gravity well), then you've just doubled world production and crashed the price. At best a manned trip to Mars is a very expensive photography trip ...
** About the only possible advantage I can think of for space industrialization is building microgravity manufacturing at scale. In this case Luna makes a lot more sense than Mars as it's lower gravity, and nearer ...
> Manned missions are also currently faster and more adaptable. The years of science from Spirit and Opportunity could've been generated by a human geologist in a few weeks. (The counter point is obvious: you can launch a lot of robots for the price of one human on Mars. You just need lots of patience with the robots.)
I think that's exactly the point though - the economics for manned missions just don't add up, you can launch a hundred complex rover missions for the same price. Plus, at the moment all you're going to get out of a human landing are some nice photos and some geology reports. All of your cost goes on keeping the human alive, not on science ...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
