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There's more than just cost. Round trip latency to Mars can be reasonably measured in tens of minutes. Tasks that a human can do in seconds take days with a robot at that distance. Curiosity can move at up to 0.09mph. A human infant can move faster than that.

We've invested many billions of dollars on robots already and this is the best we have. If we could spend $200bn to do he science in a few years that trillions dollars in R&D and probably the better part of century of iteration would take, why wouldn't we send humans up?

It seems crazy to me to throw money at robotics that work well on Mars when we are already investing billions and billions of dollars on robots here on earth that aren't even able to do the things that humans do.




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