1) Actually the ISS is not necessarily representative of all manned spacecraft and they are not spending all their hours doing "survival" tasks but mostly maintenance of the machines and clean up form human occupation in Zero-G in a really large volume of space. Anyway, add a couple more people there all the time and the ratio of science to maintenance changes.

2) No engineer plan to build things based on unobtainium even if they think it probabaly will exist 20 years from now. In the mid 1960s we thought AI would be advanced enough by 2001 to produce HAL-9000s. Of course HAL also occupied a huge part of the living space on the spacecraft...

3) Any mobility a robot has will be comparably to that of humans this is a strawman. We can fly hoppers or planes and can climb around in caves and up slopes to steep for machines (unless they are specially design to do so).

4) Yes, a manned mission to Mars would open Asteroids, Jupiter and Saturn missions. But not all missions in the solar system are currently best done by humans (Venus comes to mind).

5) Yes, that was in part the point of the article. That is why we use tools. The STS has the ability to land automatically. Russia uses automatic systems all the time on the Soyuz. They do add costs so what!

6) There is huge risk in driving to work or walking around here on Earth and living at all. You reduce risk not avoid it.

7) This kind of question can be answered I suppose by testing out the concepts of Teleoperation. You may have found the best reason for return to the Moon.

8) Nope you miss the point of doing exploration yourself. Humans can see the rock which is important the robot cannot. We could also spend the money on building your perfect robot to replace all humanity.

9) I think 1 thru 8 proves you don't actual want humans as humanity to explore space. Space elevators pass thru our planets radiation belts at very slow speeds people are not the first thing they will use them for if they exist at all in the future.