Ian Crawford explained in 2012 why human space exploration will tell us more about the solar system than robotic exploration alone. There is a widely held view in the astronomical community that unmanned robotic space vehicles are, and always will be, more efficient explorers of planetary surfaces than astronauts (e.g. Coates 2001, Clements 2009, Rees 2011). Partly this comes from a common assumption that robotic exploration is cheaper than human exploration (although this isn’t necessarily true if like is compared with like) and partly from the expectation that developments in technology will relentlessly increase the capability and reduce the size and cost of robotic missions to the point that human exploration will not be able to compete. Crawford argues that the experience of human exploration during the Apollo missions, more recent field analogue studies and trends in robotic space exploration all point to exactly the opposite conclusion.
Crawford concluded that the lesson seems clear: if at some future date a series of Apollo-like human missions return to the Moon and/or are sent on to Mars, and if these are funded (as they will be) for a complex range of socio-political reasons, scientists will get more for our money piggy-backing science on them than we will get by relying on dedicated autonomous robotic vehicles which will, in any case, become increasingly unaffordable. Fortunately, there is a way forward. In 2007 the world’s space agencies came together to develop the Global Exploration Strategy (GES), which lays the foundations for a global human exploration program that could provide us with just such an opportunity (GES 2007).
One of the first fruits of the GES has been the development of a Global Exploration Roadmap (GER 2011), which outlines possible international contributions to human missions to the Moon, near-Earth asteroids and, eventually, Mars. The motivations for the GES are, needless-to-say, multifaceted, and include a range of geopolitical and societal motivations (many of them highly desirable in themselves) in addition to science.
Science would be a major beneficiary of participating in a human exploration program such as envisaged by the Global Exploration Strategy. Quite simply, this will result in new knowledge, including answers to fundamental questions regarding the origin and evolution of planets, and the distribution and history of life in the solar system, that will not be obtained as efficiently, and in many cases probably not obtained at all, by reliance on robotic exploration alone.
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