"Too fragile and expensive" for what? Have you looked at what we're getting back from our Mars rovers over the last 10 years? Great stuff! ALL of it could have been done by a SINGLE human in a few MONTHs of time on Mars. Yes, the human would have been vastly more expensive to get there, and harder to keep alive for even a month. But every single bit of that science and exploration could be done better and faster by a human with basic field and lab tools. And if something went wrong, having a human there would vastly increase the chances of recovering from the problem. There are some things for which a robot is far more suited, for example landing on a frickin' comet. But exploring planets, moons, asteroids (the ones that don't have suit-melting atmospheres anyway, hehe) is much better done by a human, I think.
So what we need to do is stop lamenting how expensive or difficult it is to get humans out there, and just work on *doing* it. The more we do it, the faster and cheaper and easier it will be. Look what has happened so far with Space X, for example. Now imagine them with a government-funded budget; imagine investing the same *relative* amounts of money that we invested in the Apollo missions but with today's technology and capability... And still it would be just a fraction of the money we spend on the military (and by "we" I don't just mean the US, although we are by far the biggest and "worst" spenders on military; *global* military expenditure is far too high).
- Oshyan