[elsonrodriguez]

Doing it because you can is a fine reason.

In addition to that however, sending a human crew to Mars will result in more digging, surveying, water prospecting and life hunting being done within the first month of exploration than all of the rover missions combined.

The added benefit of having humans in space, especially if their reason for being in there is because that particular bit of space is in the way of earth and a planet, is securing the legacy of the human race by putting our eggs in more than one basket.

To that end, I'll flip your assertion back on you: The only reason to send a robot to space is to prove that you can, especially if we don't follow it up with human missions.

[creshal]

> In addition to that however, sending a human crew to Mars will result in more digging, surveying, water prospecting and life hunting being done within the first month of exploration than all of the rover missions combined.

Remember, this isn't just wishful thinking. We can do a side-by-side comparison:

The Russian Lunokhod Moon rovers were engineering marvels, vastly outperforming most of NASA's Mars rovers… and they're barely worth a footnote in our exploration history of the Moon, because Apollo astronauts collected more data during lunch breaks than the Lunokhods in a good week.

[magila]

I don't think the outsized mindshare of the Apollo missions has anything to do with the amount of data they collected. In fact one of the major criticisms of the Apollo program is that it produced relatively little scientific knowledge for the amount of money that was spent on it.