I am having this conversation on an LCD screen, not an indistinguishable from reality VR environment, in spite of what VR enthusiasts have been saying since about 1990.
I walk down the street and I don't se a single VR telephone booth, or cafe. And even when I do encounter a VR machine, like a flight simulator, I have to work hard to loose myself in the illusion even for a few minutes.
To be convinced that a VR experiance could stand in for a real trip I would need to be able to take a virtual holiday for two weeks in morroco, and come back with a tan, a suitcase full of souviners, and sand in my socks, and food stains on my clothes where I was clumsy with my cutlery.
In twenty years....anything could happen, but twenty years from when I first read about the miracles VR would show me I'm writing messages on an LCD screen. And so, I suspect, are you.

To keep people alive in space we need to test our research into life support in space. So we need to keep sending people up there or we loose the ability, which means space stations and manned spaceship launches.
And if we send people into space to simulate the gravity on other worlds we've done half the work of actualy getting them there already.

Teleoperation I'm coming around to, but it's still totally unproven in space, and on earth needs to be extremely expensive and sophisticated to produce compareable results to a there in person human.

To be honest I'll be surprised if either of us live to see mass usage of the kind of VR you're hoping for, and testing life support systems on earth does not qualify them to work in space or on another world!