[John H K]

That's why you gotta send a man to do a rover's job.

We sent unmanned landers to Mars before the Apollo missions, and their data was CRITICAL in designing the lander and choosing landing sites.

It's not some either-or thing.

And for the cost of a single manned mission, we could pave Mars over in Rovers like this.

Frankly, from a PURELY SCIENTIFIC standpoint, and factoring in likely advances in robotics in the next few decades, there's no reason to have any manned missions at all from a strict cost-to-science done ratio.

The problem is that people look at it emotionally rather than rationally. I do support a manned Mars mission because of the emotional aspect.

Even though you'd make a lot more scientific discoveries spending the manned Mars mission money on hundreds or even thousands of rovers, nobody would ever actually SPEND that much money unless it was a manned mission.

[John H K]

Err, edit "Mars" to "The Moon" in first sentence of the above post :-).

[Don Joe]

IMO it would not make sense to send a manned mission to Mars until you first send a robotic mission to set up the return vehicle, extract and store the fuel, drinking water, shelter, etc. Otherwise, it would simply be too much of a gamble. Life is too precious to waste on a stunt like that.

In fact, if I was running the show, I'd make sure there were two "known" (i.e., "apparently") functional return vehicles, twice the necessary fuel and water, and two shelters awaiting the human explorers. That sort of reduncancy is a good thing, especially when several lives are at stake, and there's no other possible method of redundancy.