Humans have always been obsessed with exploring space, even from childhood we all could quote the words Neil Armstrong said as he first set foot on the moon. Although the thought of an actual human setting foot and exploring the planets themselves has always been a driving part in mankind’s obsession with space, we are at the brink of a new era of space exploration where it might not be humans that we are sending into space. Using robots in place of humans for space exploration benefits everyone, it costs a fraction of the original cost and present zeros risk to human life. With never-ending budgets cuts to space missions, space missions with robots become not only an upgrade from human space missions but a necessity if we don’t want to completely cut out all possible space exploration.
The first and foremost thing we should keep in mind when sending a human into space are the risks the humans themselves are taking, and space presents a lot of those. While
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Nowadays human space flight is so expensive it almost doesn’t seem feasible with how much of a budget that is available. As expressed by Neil deGrasse Tyson in the 2011 TAM discussion, for the amount a human space exploration program would cost we could send between a hundred and a thousand robot missions (“Our Future in Space”). This difference is so drastic it is no wonder we are starting to question why we are sending manned missions into flight. With government funding being continually cut for space programs it changes from an issue of is it worth it to send a human astronaut instead of a robot to an issue of that it is only possible to use a robot given the current funding we have available. Musk himself described the funding of a manned mission to be politically toxic due to it being very dangerous for a politician to back the funding as it seems to be such a huge waste of money