The problem is that without embedded human smarts such exploration is very limited, novel / unexpected situations are hard to predict or react to, and the laten

The problem is that without embedded human smarts such exploration is very limited, novel / unexpected situations are hard to predict or react to, and the latency between earth-bound command posts and non-orbital remotes makes that unusable for anything beyond batch orders. While hardly trivial, remote control within earth atmosphere has much more reasonable latency, and thus applicability.