I can't believe the wussy replies I'm reading here. Robots are tools. Period.

You don't send a tool to do a Man's job.

You send a Man with the tool to do the job so he can do it better.

If robots were anywhere near as good as folks seem to think I would still argue that the point is to get humans in space. The family of Man growing up and out of the cradle. It's great that we have such sophisticated tools, but they are still just tools.

I have zero interest in supporting space tele-exploration by academics. It's nice that people are interested in data gathering about planets around distant stars, but why should my tax dollars go to fund that? In my view that should be funded by the universities or consortiums for whom these academics work. I would rather that my tax dollars went to efforts that promote the U.S.'s competitive economic advantage. Here the spinoff argument wouldn't work for me because of the esoteric nature of the technology developed to support any particular space data gathering mission.

Additionally, focusing on a robot only program would have significant unintended consequences. One example might be the re-prioritizing of space robot development work against, say, volcano robot development work, or deep sea robot development work, or upper-atmosphere robot development work, or tornado robot development work.

Who do you think is going to get the short end of the stick in that equation?

Face it...a robots-only program is a dead end. Because it can't compete with human concerns. The drama of a robot on Mars with excess dust on its solar cells is nothing compared with the drama of an over-the-edge astronaut, or astronauts in imminent peril.

Tools. Robots are nothing but tools. Very fancy tools, but that's thanks to the brilliance of the massive parallel-processing capability of the human mind, which is thereby able to make intuitive leaps impossible for a tool, no matter how cleverly programmed. All of the work done to date by the two Mars rovers could have been done in a couple of days, and much more thoroughly, by a couple of Marsnauts. And just who, by the way, is paying for the teams of folks still running the program long after its budgeted end?

Part of the problem is the crappy way we spend our space money. One example is the CRV, which I saw still being assembled at JSC in the summer of 2002, even though use of the CRV had been terminated sometime in 2001, early 01 IIRC. So why were they still building it? To test the hardware that the American taxpayers had paid for and which NASA had received. So what! Warehouse the stuff, retask the engineers, and sell it at auction to some folks in the private sector who want to give it a go, or could use the stuff for something else. Cancelling or ending a program shouldn't mean that folks are still on the payroll working on it years later.

I'm not saying the Manned space program is perfect, not by a long shot. But it does represent the kind of sector in which it may be possible to advance the U.S.'s competitive edge through things like materials development. Entrepreneurs are willing to take risks where humans want to put their money. Humans want to go into space and do things there (the entrepreneur doesn't care what). Ergo...

Focus on robots and a LOT of people will turn their backs on the program. That is a high probability outcome, I assure you.

Oh, and I think the article is a load of bunkus, even if it is on CNN.