Manned, Or Unmanned, Space Exploration

There has been a debate ever since The Apollo Moon landings about whether space exploration, particularly of the planets, can be undertaken more cost-effectively and safely by sending out unmanned probes. The unmanned side of the argument has always been bolstered by the economic realities. The cash for manned deep space flight has never been available. Better therefore to do what we can with ever more sophisticated machines runs the case. And it is true that NASA, most particularly, has had some spectacular successes with fly-by and orbital missions to the outer planets, and orbital, lander and rover visits to Mars. The martian rover missions in particular have captured the popular imagination.

But I believe that the argument for preferring robotic to human exploration is deeply flawed. It entirely neglects the vast difference in the capacity of men and machines to collect data and samples from each planet or moon they visit. Men spent about 160 man hours walking and driving on the Moon. Imagine how many thousands of unmanned missions would have been needed to retrieve the quantity of lunar rock samples which just twelve astronauts obtained in that incredibly short time. And Apollo was just a series of short duration missions. There was no continuing human presence on the Moon. The point about human exploration is that it can be rapidly incremental. If we have a substantial colony on Mars, in which pressurised manned vehicles are eventually used to conduct a wide ranging survey and sampling of the planet; then we will probably be able to achieve in a couple of months what a century's worth of robotic rovers could deliver. And the scientific research and exploration will just keep on growing year after year.

What is more than this is that Mars will be a proving ground for techniques of deep space transportation, survival and exploration, which will provide us with the expertise to move on out into the solar system, picking off planets and moons for exploration one at a time. Again, manned exploration will be more rapidly incremental in nature and will deliver vastly larger results. That is because, as I have argued before, we are the ultimate machines. All-purpose exploratory tools, who develop and perfect our expertise as we go along.
Every robot explorer has to be envisaged, planned, engineered, developed, and ultimately flown, managed and manipulated by hundreds of scientists and technicians over a mission that may last decades. Yet still the approach is the ultimate in short-termism. If we put in the investment and patiently wait out the ten to fifteen years we will need, we will finally have the long-term exploratory potential of men on the surface of Mars. Then we can really start moving.

Progress is just that, a progression. Had we had the capacity to send small robotic machines to the Americas, rather than Columbus and his many successors, we would probably now be in the process of designing and programming a machine for making the first ground-breaking survey of the Ohio valley. The first ascent of the Rocky Mountains would probably still lie about half a millennium in our future!

To quote Protagoras: 'Man is the measure of all things'. I would simply add that he is also the measurer of all things. So let us send men and women, not just machines, out to do the measuring.