Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Why send humans to Mars

I'm not so sure for the Moon...
dtb — (archived)

For Mars and beyond, light speed delays are a real bottleneck. Really limits the amount of "telepresence" you can do.

I'm not so sure that's true of the Moon. If you put tens of billions into tele-operated lunar rovers and sample return equipment, would you get more or less science done than sending a few manned missions for a couple of weeks each?

I'll grant that the manned missions would get more done per day, but the total number of mission-days on the surface would be vastly, vastly greater for the tele-operated option.

It's notable that for deep sea exploration, Robert Ballard used to be the foremost advocate of human presence, but now favors tele-operated machines. He's just as big a fan as ever of onsite, close up inspection (vs thinkign you can learn it all via remote sensing with towed sonars/magnetomers/etc and drill cores). But while that required crewed submersibles like Alvin in 1970, a heck of a lot can now be done using unmanned underwater vehicles.

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