[Mamzelle]

Do much more? What do they DO? They maintain the Space Ferry and the Ferry Dock. Mostly they get rewarded for ethnicity, nationality, or contribution to the Clinton White House Corruption Coverup--with a ride, a la John Glenn.

The exciting stuff is not this interminable, dangerous FERRYING.

Go to the Jet Propulsion Lab site, out of Palo Alto, for some real eye candy! And, thankfully, not a wannabe, egotistical jockey in sight, just engineers and physicists and the cool stuff they're building.

Cut out the seats and the life-support supplies, and see what we could send. Why send a probe to Mars, just a probe?

Why not send an ARMADA of probes to Mars, en masse, to disperse and return data? Such a lack of inspiration...

[Wonder Warthog]

"Do much more? What do they DO? They maintain the Space Ferry and the Ferry Dock. Mostly they get rewarded for ethnicity, nationality, or contribution to the Clinton White House Corruption Coverup--with a ride, a la John Glenn."

Maintain equipment, build new equipment, take data, design and re-design experiments, run experiments, and fix any of a thousand unexpected problems, any one of which would kill a robotic probe dead in its tracks.

Add to that the "little tiny" problem with using robotic probes---TIME LAG--imposed by that un-impressive phsical law called "the speed of light". Robotic probes now (and for the foreseeable future) are not sufficiently autonomous to work completely without human intervention--and the further away from earth they are, the worse the problem gets.

As to "sending and ARMADA of probes"---a combined manned/robotic approach would actually be cheaper--to wit--with a permanent manned presence in LEO, you actually build the probes in and launch them from space.

And no, Virginia, I don't suffer from "a lack of inspiration". I think that's YOUR problem.