[azgolfer]

I still say robots are far better than humans for space exploration. There was even a proposal for repairing the Hubble with them. It would have been better if they had designed it with this type of repair/upgrade mission in mind. But it is always easier for them to justify an incremental cost, along with the romantic notion of humans in space.

[hga]

It probably wouldn't have worked for the last repair job, where they worked on things that had never been planned for repair (tiny screws and all that).

As an incremental cost, assuming you have a manned space program, you can't justify doing robotic repair due to the extra costs and limitations.

On the other hand the next big telescope project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope) will be non-repairable, but that sort of goes with its mission, which is to sit at the Earth-Sun L2 point. Design life of 5 years, they hope it'll make it to 10. Note that the Hubble has made it to 20 years and they expect it'll last at least another 4.

And I'll certainly agree with you that if you want to explore beyond Mars for now, do it with robots. And to put humans on the Moon or Mars, send robots first (as we did for the Moon and are doing for Mars).

On the other hand, if I wanted to thoroughly play with an asteroid, I would want to do it with a manned mission (after suitable earlier check-out by robots).