That's a lot of cheaper robotic missions. If something breaks, there's another one in the works.
We should also be developing robots that can do what the human can do. That investment will pay off in many ways.
Btw, the first DARPA Grand Challenge was a bust in 2004. No one finished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge#2004_Gra...
That investment is absolutely worthwhile, but we aren't even vaguely close to a general-purpose robot that can do what humans do. One human geologist could do the work of an entire fleet of Curiosity rovers. It's a matter of if all of the associated dangers of space travel worth all of that scientific knowledge gained from both sending people to do interplanetary science and from developing new tech to get us there is worth it - IMO, the answer is a resounding 'yes'.
I bet we can get the money for better robots. It doesn't even need to come from NASA's budget. The DoD, private industry tax breaks, etc can pay for the research.
https://www.wired.com/story/atlas-robot-does-backflips-now/
If we lose a robot on Mars, not much changes.
My observation is that we can start immediately with attainable goals, at a cost we'll likely accept, with no risk of human life, and with immediate economic and technological benefits.
In the meantime, we've lost 4 years... with another decade more with no real goal.
My suggestion makes forward progress every year. At some point, sending humans to Mars, for example, becomes a small inexpensive step, rather than a giant costly leap.
We've invested many billions of dollars on robots already and this is the best we have. If we could spend $200bn to do he science in a few years that trillions dollars in R&D and probably the better part of century of iteration would take, why wouldn't we send humans up?
It seems crazy to me to throw money at robotics that work well on Mars when we are already investing billions and billions of dollars on robots here on earth that aren't even able to do the things that humans do.
That's not a lower bound. That's an upper bound on what hopeful NASA contractors think they can milk the government for in doing it The NASA Way.
The point is that robotics and other technologies are advancing extremely rapidly, but they're still not anywhere even remotely close to being able to compare to humans in general purpose functionality - let alone improvisation. Don't forget that those amazing videos of Atlas are the result of countless takes and on-site specialization. This [2] article describes the results of the most recent DARPA Robotics Challenge which featured all the big names, including Atlas. The competition included tasks like walking, opening a door, and climbing up stairs. The most ostensibly difficult would be navigating a specially modified vehicle after having humans carefully place and suspend their robot inside it. And the developers all knew ahead of time exactly what the tasks would be and the circumstance, except for one surprise task which ended up being pulling a lever. The long and short is that it was a disaster. Quoting the article:
"If there's a single lesson from the [DARPA Robotics Challenge], it's that humanoid robots are falling robots. Also, that the road to humanoids that aren't so clumsy will be long, and strewn with shattered components. If DARPA doesn't hold another version of the DRC, then the first one will have been little more than a grim status update, and a self-contained failure, for the few of us that realized it happened."
The point here is that we are a long ways away from robots that can remotely compare to humans for general purpose tasks. The timeline for getting to the Moon and even to Mars on the other hand is very near future.
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Beyond all this, space exploration is not just about science. Did you know China put a probe on the moon in 2013? Technically it was a rover, but back to those robotics problems - it became a probe. It was the first time anything had soft landed on the moon since 1976. If you did know this you're probably already a huge enthusiast in the field because the world collectively yawned, even though it made some groundbreaking discoveries including discovering the moon's geographic makeup was far different than we thought. That discovery is playing no minor role in driving the recent moon race.
But people want to see and discover space themselves. And there are lots of people willing to pay lots of money for the privilege. Two individuals have already purchased a Moon flyby from SpaceX - scheduled for next year. And even though a flyby is nothing compared to a soft landing, that will not be met with a yawn. Action requires money. Money requires public drive. Public drive requires manned operations.
[1] - http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2017/0906-cu...
[2] - https://www.popsci.com/darpa-robotics-challenge-was-bust-why...