Bowser said...

"A robot in space is Man in space."

...too true. All our best efforts building the bloody things is ignored by making it all about astronauts doing daring things.

Back in the 1940s & 50s when the dream of spaceflight was being developed no one imagined what machines would be capable of. Space stations, fly-by missions, moon-based telescopes etc etc were all necessary because no one knew that we'd have machines that can do the job so much easier - at least the initial reconnoitering and basic exploration, as well as boring crap like transferring TV & phone signals, photographing weather patterns, snapping long, long exposures of the heavens, and so on. People were sent along to change the photoplates, vacuum tubes, wiring, clean the diesels and so forth - some of the first space station designs used a recycled diesel cycle which thermochemically recycled the exhaust products using solar energy.

The "Space Race" was all about the Cold War and was shut down when it became irrelevant. And by the 1970s it was obvious that robots would do all the mundane work that would've taken massive space-crews before micro-minaturisation came along.

Now we're left with the singular goal of human space - colonisation - but no one is officially making that the main point of space-flight. Except the daring types like Bigelow and SpaceX. Government gets chills thinking about it.

So robots should do what robots do well and we should get out of the von Braun/Heinlein era thinking that humans are needed for anything but making a New World. I think that's a noble goal, but all the other crap reasons for people-in-space are sounding pretty hollow as robotics improves.