Hello Curious Patrick What I mean is that the robotic program has succeeded on its own terms. The state of the art has improved substantially since the days of Pioneer. Software has improved by orders of magnitude. Robots now have limited autonomy. We've learned an incredible amount about orbital dynamics, gravity boosts and other technological enablers. Robots have returned valuable data about planets, asteroids, stars and comets (the Mars mappers are my personal favorites). As I indicated in my post, each mission has improved the state of the art. By contrast, the manned side of the house has been totally stagnant for years. I don't think we've learned much from ISS that we didn't already know from MIR. The question about whether robots could do better than humans is a separate question that I didn't address in that post. But I'll take it on now. They can sure hold their breath longer. This means that they can do multi-year missions that humans are a hundred years away from. Do humans have better intuition about which rock to turn over? Sure they do. For now. By the time we can seriously consider a manned mission from Mars (let's ignore cranks like Bob Zubrin) the state of computer art will have advanced another few orders of magnitude. It may be a very different equation then. I'm certainly not opposed to human spaceflight. I agree with those who see exploration and curiosity as a core virtue of our species. I also fully understand that this comes with significant risk. But I think when we ask taxpayers to sacrifice national treasure and when we ask astronauts to risk their lives and when we ask scientists and engineers to give up their nights, weekends and family life, it ought to be for more than we're getting. Michael

This is why the robotic program has been so much more effective over the last couple of decades. I'm not sure what you mean by more "effective". Are you saying robots have done better than humans could have done the same things?

Curious Patrick