Re: ....Question? Have They Found a Reason to go 'To the Moon and Mars' Yet???



Sending people is what convinces the public to spend money. But you first
need to send machines in order to do the prospecting, to find the spot most
likely to provide the greatest return. Then send people. People can
accomplish far more than machines, but supporting them costs so much more as
well. By concentrating the use of people in those areas which most need the
resources that people can apply, and use machines to fill in the details,
the maximum value for the science dollar is obtained. This is a no-brainer,
which should make it easy for "Ordover" to understand.

I understand have it backwards - first the cheaper machines find
something interesting; then the humans go look in detail. It's like
looking for oil in a given area - first you do a light, cheap survey of
the entire area, then you run that through your knowledge base of what
area is most likely to have oil, then you do the expensive drilling in
those areas. For some reason you want to drill first and survey
later, which makes no sense.

The landing sites for the Moon missions were selected after carefully
screening the Moon for interesting/safe areas to land. That's what the
robots on Mars and over Mars are doing.

.

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