>this accomplishes all of your objectives No, it doesn't. It doesn't at all! Establishing human presence on Mars is one of the core objectives of the whole pr

>this accomplishes all of your objectives No, it doesn't. It doesn't at all! Establishing human presence on Mars is one of the core objectives of the whole program. It's one of the reasons we care about Mars. Hell, moving gradually toward making additional homes for human beings is part of why we do space exploration in general. Yes, you can gather rocks via robots and send back data and whatever else, but to claim that doing so exhausts the set of reasonable objectives for Mars missions is just silly. Here's a thought experiment to confirm: How many probes have we flown to how many planets in the solar system? Any idea, roughly, when the first one happened, or the last? You may know, but most folks have no idea. Conversely: where in the solar system have humans been? Any idea when we first got there, or when the last trip was? Unlike all the many highly valuable probe missions we've sent, here, most people actually know something about it. This is because people care about other people and their experiences, in a way that they don't care about scientific results as such. Putting human beings on other worlds is an end in itself, and it is simply not accomplished by sending drones instead.