There are things we learned from Apollo with 1960's technology that the best robots today couldn't tell us. The entire past two decades of rover exploration on

There are things we learned from Apollo with 1960's technology that the best robots today couldn't tell us. The entire past two decades of rover exploration on Mars could have been accomplished by 1 astronaut in a EVA suit with a rock hammer in a couple of hours. Sometimes you actually need a geologist/biologist/botanist there to determine ground truth, and sometimes people ARE more capable than machines. You need both. Apollo couldn't tell us there was water in the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar poles because they didn't go to the poles, but the Lunar Prospector, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and LCROSS gave us good reason to think so. The orbiters we sent couldn't tell use the age of the Moon or its likely formation process because you actually need a hand-picked diverse set of rock samples for that, and lots of them. It's not an either/or debate, and shouldn't be one. We need to send both humans AND machines. And, at the end of the day, basic science is not why we're going to space. It's about spreading the human race beyond the confines of this rock and establishing a permanent and ever lasting space-faring culture. You CAN'T do that with robots alone.