While not the immediacy of a glove box, the moon is not much further off in terms of light speed. We have all this earthly brainpower behind our remote tools. Adding men on the scene will not really add that much. Look how our current space walks are done, with most decisions being done from the ground. The relatively slight increase in efficiency cannot justify the huge added costs involved. We could have launched 100 hubbles (and scrapped the few that failed) for the cost of the shuttle program (which has repaired hubble twice).

It is likely that lunanauts will just be mostly teleoperators anyway. The workload on ISS is mostly work needed to support manned operation. There is very little work done to actually perform the core reason (experiments and scientific exploration) for having it up there. On the ISS a lot of work is done by robot arms. Do you really think that couldn't be teleoperated from the ground instead of in orbit? Gaining a second in terms of delay does not justify lunanauts.

If we had concentrated on getting unmanned cargo to the moon instead of this emphasis on manned, we could be far ahead of where we are with a lot of lunar capability already. Mars is a great example. Manned effectiveness on mars is currently zero and won't be anything for at least 15 years. Meanwhile we have had continuous unmanned capabilty for many years. If you scaled the budget to increase unmanned presence you would get a huge multiplication of return, while with man you will get very little, very far away, and very limited return.

If NASA is going to ever convince anybody about manned approach for exploration, then I want to see numbers as compared to unmanned for the same tasks. You will never see the numbers because they can't justify it with the cost numbers. Like I have said over and over, you have 2 distinct issues, exploration and colonization. Obviously, man has to be involved in colonization. But the path to colonization is not served by premature wasting of resources for short duration (very expensive) manned exploration missions.

Specifically for moon exploration, I would love to hear how a in situ astronaut is going to add that much to a teleoperated robot. A robot can turn over a rock send back the spectral analysis and an earth side geologist can make real time decisions on what targets to explore or where to drill. In this day and age sending back high bandwidth pictures, movies, and spectral analysis is current technology. Teleoperating a smart rover, could be as simple as operating an airplane autopilot. Just give it very basic commands and it does the rest. The range for rovers will be much greater unmanned. The risk(to men) will be zero, whereas with manned the risk is always the paramount issue that requires so much overhead.

Through out history there have been many man vs machine battles. And the same resistance is always there, but inevitably when the machines simply out cost perform the men, the men do other things and the machines take over that task. Yes, the furniture is not beautifully hand crafted, but it is utilitarian coming off the assembly line. We don't need hand crafted exploration, but utilitarian.