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Robots vs Humans in Space

Stephen Hawking: The Future of Space -Manned vs Robotic Missions?

In astronomy, extraterrestrial, sci-fi, technology on March 7, 2010 at 4:06 pm

“Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don’t catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don’t spread the human race into space, which I’m arguing should be our long-term strategy. If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Stephen Hawking, Cambridge University

Will unmanned robotic missions be able to detect weird microscopic life-forms they are not programmed to recognize that might be lurking below the surface of Saturn’s Titan, or beneath the murky seas of Jupiter’s jumbo moon, Europa?
The answer to this question is at the core of one of the greatest of the ongoing debates in space exploration: the question of man vs. unmanned robotic missions.
NASA currently operates more than 50 robotic spacecraft that are studying Earth and reaching throughout the solar system, from Mercury to Pluto and beyond. Another 40 unmanned NASA missions are in development, and space agencies in Europe, Russia, Japan, India and China are running or building their own robotic craft.
What is not commonly known however is that many of NASA’s leading scientists also champion human exploration as a worthy goal in its own right and as a critically important part of space science in the 21st century. The Obama administration’s new NASA strategy that strongly favors robotic exploration, has opened the debate anew........

http://mindgangsta.wordpress.com/2010/03/07/stephen-hawking-the-future-of-space-manned-vs-robotic-missions/