> Compare the 35.7 km traversed in three days by the Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972 with the almost identical distance (34.4 km) traversed by the Mars Ex

> Compare the 35.7 km traversed in three days by the Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972 with the almost identical distance (34.4 km) traversed by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity in eight years. Yes, and the Rover costs 1/150th the price. We could send up literally a hundred rovers for the cost of the Apollo program and still have billions of dollars left to burn. We could build a giant Nolan Joker style money pyramid and roast marshmallows. More-over all modern Mars missions are done on a relatively shoe-string budget using robots NASA knows are much less capable than they feasibly could construct. Basically Opportunity only went 34.4 km in 8 years because it was built by the NASA equivalent of 2 guys in a shed for beer money. Since the humiliating loss of Mars Climate Orbiter NASA has focused only on sending things to Mars they're not quite so afraid to lose, which means rather drastically reduced rover capabilities and lessened scientific payloads. >Greatly increased efficiency in sample collection and sample return capacity. Compare the 382 kg of samples returned by Apollo with the 0.32 kg from the Russian robotic sample return missions Lunas 16, 20 and 24, and the zero kg returned so far by any robotic mission to Mars. This is comparing apples to oranges. One of the great benefits of robots is they don't have to come back, which massively saves on the budget. Manned missions by necessity do need to bring about 3 x 75 pounds of dead weight (aka 3 man crew) back home, so you may as well have them line their pockets with rocks if you're just burning money anyway. >Increased potential for large-scale exploratory activities (e.g. drilling) and the deployment and maintenance of complex equipment. This I do agree with. Large scale drilling in the asteroid built would actually benefit from human presence, as it's far enough from Earth that light speed lag is non-trivial and mining in space will likely be a very complex, novel situation that will benefit from human level intelligence. But just walking around on Mars, doing sample collecting? The case seems extremely thin. Especially as, even by the article's own admission, robots are improving to the point a human is only "1-2x better" than modern AI-assisted drones. Rather than the 1500x human-robot performance disparity the author highlights for earlier robots. Given the relative costs of people and robots, it's very much still tilted in favor of drones.