What advantages does a manned spaceship have over a robotic/remote operated spaceprobe when exploring targets in the solar system? Could astronauts reconfigure hardware for changed or new objectives due to new discoveries? Could they operate hardware more effeciently than a ground crew with time delay? Would there actually be scientists on board rather than engineers for maintenance?
>>7807409
none. That's why a rover reached mars but not men
putting a man on the moon was just for posterity, anything they collected could have been collected by a robot.
>>7807409
Humans are more adaptable and work quicker. Sometimes it's just easier to have a person walk over to just go do something then fuck around and try to remote control a drone to do it. A human with a bag full of tools is more versatile than a drone designed to do one or two things. Those stupid robot claws are clumsy as fuck.
They're not always worth having around, though. Most space exploration and science should be unmanned, unless it's science focused on humans themselves.
>>7807462
>A human with a bag full of tools is more versatile than a drone designed to do one or two things
yeah but that doesn't take cost into account
>>7807487
Yeah humans need a lot of room and bullshit like toilets, sleep and food, ect. Plenty of downsides, but people with tools have serious advantages over robotic systems.
While a robot might be cheaper, they are more failure-prone and you might have to determine if the discount is worth potentially failing the mission.
>>7807487
So I guess having an expensive human crew becomes more cost-effective when the mission itself becomes more expensive and it would be stupid to have that mission fail because a connector cable is loose and could just be fastened by pushing it.
>>7807409
The primary advantage, in theory, is the ability to respond to problems with much greater ease and flexibility, and to perform a drastically wider variety of experiments with the same equipment. Also, the equipment can be cheaper, since it doesn't have to never break down or behave unexpectedly, without any maintenance or supervision, a lot of development cost and complexity can be saved.
Disadvantages include basically everything. Human exploration only makes sense from an engineering standpoint after the infrastructure to support them is already in place, and with current launch prices and resulting cost of space hardware, the economic standpoint is such that exploration with humans never makes sense.
Humans are heavy, bulky, constantly consume large quantities of resources, some of which are very difficult to synthesize or recycle, and require enormous accomodations to function properly.
This doesn't mean that there's no reason for humans to go into space or to other planets and do stuff, but pioneering exploration is not one of those reasons.
