“If you lose astronauts it’s a national tragedy and you have to reengineer everything. If you lose a robotic probe, it’s just another robot and a cheap one at that.”
And if you have a robot that does amazing things most people will likewise not care. People connect with people. Besides people can do a lot of different things. Robots do one thing.
Well sure people like people, no doubt about it. But I'm talkin’ about the most bang for the buck in space exploration, not PR for the taxpayers so you can get more money out of them. It's very, very expensive to haul people around compared to robots. Yeah, they can do more, but is the incremental cost worth it? I don't think so, but I'm not terribly impressed with the manned probes vs. unmanned. I just think you get more science with robots.
As to robots doing just one thing, incorrect. A probe does what it's designed to do. That may be just one thing, or it may be many things. A multitasking probe would be something like the Rover's we have on Mars now. Been there for years. Still operating (sort of), ‘cause they don't breath oxygen or eat, or have to come back. And they do lots more than one thing.
I don't really care about inspiring mankind and all of that BS. If the space research is important, then for the most part, it's done more effectively without humans. If circuses are important to the public, then obviously manned spaceflight is a higher priority.
Please don't think that I'm completely down on manned flight. It is a neat engineering achievement (expensive, but neat). You have to realize where a lot of this stuff came from. I recall that the original Space Shuttle came out of the late 50’s and early 60’s. I remember it in my grade school Weekly Reader (I think it was called something like the Dyna Soar). Well, it never met expectations for mission efficiency. Lots of delays (years) due to accidents and other problems. Not that unmanned stuff didn't have problems, you just didn't have to worry about keeping the humans alive. Much cheaper and less to engineer around and therefore easier, cheaper and faster to put a probe up.
I seem to remember you used to be able to put up 3-4 probes for the price of a manned probe, but that was a long time ago before the Shuttle had a lot of delays and became unreliable. It would be interesting to find what the current ratio is. I just remember it was always in favor of unmanned.