[DPB101]

Thanks! I didn't know that. I despised Sagan so there is one strike against unmanned flight for me (irrational as my feeling may be).

See some people refer to Ben Bova and say manned vs unmanned is a phony debate--it is not either/or. Another good comment I saw is that people tend to see the debate of how to spend the money within the budget of NASA. That appeals to me. The debate should be how much to spend within the budgets of NASA, HUD, the NEA--among others--for space exploration. I tend towards 100%.

[RightWhale]

The way we sent men to the moon seemed reasonable at the time, and it involved robots, lots of them. Every camera they smashed into the moon snapping pictures all the way down was a robot. The landers they sent to potential manned landing sites were robots. Robot exploration has its place when you need to know conditions at the landing site. It was thought that a manned lunar lander might disappear to the bottom of a 1/4 mile of dust, so the Surveyors were sent ahead to test the ground.

A couple more RC cars are being sent to the surface of Mars in a couple weeks. The plan should be to check a potential settlement site, but it seems they are after pure science.

On top of that, manned space exploration is way too expensive the way it is being done. It's the usual: The ISS and the Space Shuttle were only the first stage of a true space transportation system that was to reach to the moon and to Mars. Usual in the sense that the committees got hold of the design and decided to run with that while ignoring the reason for creating it. No room for individual genius. All show, no go.

But Dr. Malin's creation is still going strong, to the consternation of the committees. An individual with a clear idea somehow got past the mission adjustors. That's what can be done, and what committees will never do. It's a robot, the MGS, and thanks to that Mars should be a goal of manned spaceflight, no question. Maybe the primary goal, although the moon should have some human presense along the way.