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I'm thrilled that we went to the moon, and am glad we did. Venera is just an example of a possible alternative to what we chose to do by sending humans in that

I'm thrilled that we went to the moon, and am glad we did. Venera is just an example of a possible alternative to what we chose to do by sending humans in that era. Less science for less money. 1969 space technology was the result of a mandate to get humans on the moon. A mandate to get robots on the moon would have likely radically increased the ability of these robots to collect data as compared to what Venera accomplished. I'm still +1 for human exploration.

Arizhel 10y ago
You're forgetting that we already sent landers to the Moon before we sent people. We didn't get much out of them. We just didn't have the technology, and the public wasn't going to be excited by a campaign that went like this: "it's too dangerous and expensive to send people to the Moon, so we're going to invest a ton of money into robotics technology so we can send robots there in 40 years!" A mandate to put robots there any faster wouldn't have worked; we just didn't have the technology. We developed a lot of our current computing technology IN the Apollo program itself, so the reason our computer-driven automation is so good these days is because we did send people to the Moon, instead of waiting and hoping for technology to improve.