People begin from the premise that there should be lots of primates living away from earth, and then work backwards from there. I don’t think governments should be paying so much for such activities.
In my opinion it is not a good use of public money relative to other space projects, and crude missions to mars would likely destroy any hope of finding life there should it have existed, making them actively harmful.
It seems sometimes that for NASA, the big goal is to have a large source of steady funding is the goal, and a space station is the best way to get that (hence the insane space station in the lunar mission plan). I get some vague impression that politicians like talking about missions to the moon or mars more than space stations, telescopes or probes.
> People begin from the premise that there should be lots of primates living away from earth, and then work backwards from there.
No, people begin with interest in all things around them and from that conclude that being closer to them would be more convenient. This idea is perhaps as old as the human race itself.
Modern robots aren't as capable as humans, so if the project is big enough, human involvement is reasonable.
I don’t think ‘closer to thing’ is a legitimate goal to spend enormous amounts of public money on. (I’m more ambivalent about private funding except for the contamination problem)
I’m not aware of any serious research questions about the solar system which could be answered sooner or more cost effectively by sending people to investigate (except for questions about eg how well primates survive in various extraterrestrial situations, which are only interesting insofar as there are legitimate reasons to put primates in such situations).
The Moon research was significantly advanced with the data collected from the rocks Apollo astronauts brought from the Moon.
Your skepticism is widely shared and also widely debunked. I don't think we'll move the state of the debate ahead with short messages, it needs more detailed and prolonged discussion. There are reasons defending the space exploration, and there are reasons defending human flights. You can personally disagree, but your arguments are based only on opinions, which aren't better than opinions of the other side.
In the 1960s it would be hard to retrieve samples from the moon without humans. I don’t think that’s true today. For mars, isn’t it obviously much more difficult to try to get a big enough rocket to return a load of heavy meatbags than to just return the rocks and leave the robots behind?
In my opinion it is not a good use of public money relative to other space projects, and crude missions to mars would likely destroy any hope of finding life there should it have existed, making them actively harmful.
It seems sometimes that for NASA, the big goal is to have a large source of steady funding is the goal, and a space station is the best way to get that (hence the insane space station in the lunar mission plan). I get some vague impression that politicians like talking about missions to the moon or mars more than space stations, telescopes or probes.