From Alex Swanson
In your interview with astrophysicist Neil Tyson, he suggests that “the return on the dollar is vastly greater if we send robots [into space] instead of people” (10 April, p 46). This appears to be a common view, but I would suggest it is simplistic.
It is true that for many purposes robots are not only more cost-effective, but are even the only option. It is clearly absurd to think of sending people to the outer solar system, or of a manned landing on Venus.
But in the case of Mars, I have been struck by how little the two latest NASA rovers have accomplished. It seems to be that boring a half-inch hole in a rock is regarded as a great achievement. Moving a few metres a day is success worthy of celebration. And we hear that the Spirit rover has finally achieved its mission by covering 600 metres in 90 days – a distance that a single human astronaut could well do in one.
I don’t wish to belittle NASA’s achievements, but it has to be said that the discoveries it has made are newsworthy only because we knew so little before. Mars is a planet with a land area comparable to the Earth’s. Serious exploration using rovers is not only going to take forever, it will also need an awful lot of rovers.
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The current missions cost less than $1 billion each. A manned mission could cost $60 billion. But on current performance a manned mission could easily accomplish so much more that it would be the truly economic approach.
Milton Keynes, Northamptonshire, UK
