[somenameforme]

The first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes.

There's a fundamental problem with unmanned stuff - moving parts break. So for instance Curiosity's "drill" broke after 7 activations. It took 2 years of extensive work by a team full of scientists to create a work-around that's partially effective (which really begs a how many ... does it take to screw in a light bulb joke). A guy on the scene with a toolkit could have repaired it to perfection in a matter of minutes. And the reason I put drill in quotes is because it's more like a glorified scraper. It has a max depth of 6cm. We're rather literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer.

Another example of the same problem is in just getting to places. You can't move too fast for the exact same reasons, so Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h). So it takes it about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area, meaning you want human feedback with about a 40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. I'm also leaving out the fact that the tires have also, as might be expected, broken. So it's contemporary traveling speed is going to be even slower.

Just imagine trying to explore Earth traveling around at 1 mile a year and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm! And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future.

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Beyond all of this, there are no "moral problems" in manned spaceflight. It's risky and will remain risky. If people want to pursue it, that's their choice. And manned spaceflight is extremely inspiring, and really demonstrates what man is capable of. Putting a man on the Moon inspired an entire generation to science and achievement. The same will be true with the first man on Mars. NASA tried to tap into this with their helicopter drone on Mars but people just don't really care about rovers, drones, and probes.

[eru]

For the cost of sending a guy, you can probably just send ten probes.

[somenameforme]

You get extremely diminishing returns with probes. There's only so much you can do from orbit. Rovers are substantially more useful, but are extremely expensive. Curiosity and Perseverance each cost more than $3 billion. As the technology advances and we get the basic infrastructure setup, humans will rapidly become much cheaper than rovers.

A big cost with rovers is the R&D and one-off manufacturing of the rover itself. With humans you have the added cost of life support, but 0 cost in manufacturing and development. The early human missions will obviously be extremely expensive as we pack in all the supplies to start basic industry (large scale Sabatier Reactions [1] will be crucial), energy, long-term habitation, and so on.

But eventually all you're going to need to be paying for is food/life support/medicine/entertainment/etc, which will be relatively negligible.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

[eru]

> You get extremely diminishing returns with probes. There's only so much you can do from orbit. Rovers are substantially more useful, but are extremely expensive.

I was talking about anything you can do without humans. Not just probes that stay in space.

> A big cost with rovers is the R&D and one-off manufacturing of the rover itself. With humans you have the added cost of life support, but 0 cost in manufacturing and development.

You could mass produce rovers.

The human life support is gonna be extremely expensive. So it's a bit silly to say that other than that, humans have 0 cost.

Rovers have the same '0 cost' component, from the humans remotely given them commands and guidance from earth.

[ExoticPearTree]

Yeah, but then you are going to get a very little return from those 10 probes.

Sending a person there for a one way mission would probably give us more data than 100 probes. And I have a feeling that there are a lot of people willing to go on a such a mission.

[eru]

I don't share your optimism.

Have a look at https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/20-breakthroughs-from-2... and keep in mind that those are those are already the highlights. The best they could come up with.

[somenameforme]

What sort of things would you expect on the list? A lot of those are critical prerequisites for humanity's advancement. They also left out some really important stuff like studies on sex in space, exercise in space, effects of radiation in space (as well as hardening electronics), and so on.

A space station on Mars would probably not provide much more than that so should be a low priority, but obviously the discoveries to be made on land trounce those to be made in space.

[eru]

> A lot of those are critical prerequisites for humanity's advancement. They also left out some really important stuff like studies on sex in space, exercise in space, effects of radiation in space (as well as hardening electronics), and so on.

Hardening electronics research can be done without pesky humans getting in the way. No need for the ISS.

All the other examples you mentioned are quite circular: humans in space help us research problems we only have because we are putting humans in space.