The Argument for Manned Space Exploration

News from Mars: It seems the soil probe on NASA's InSight lander got stuck. They've finally managed to unstuck it, however.

But without any Martian explorers to lend a hand, Spohn and his colleagues on the “anomaly response team” have had to improvise with the only tool available—a small shovel-like “scoop” on the end of InSight’s robotic arm. Over the last year they’ve tried to punch down the walls of the hole around the mole, to fill in the hole with nearby sand, and to give the mole more purchase by pinning it against the side of the hole with the scoop. But to no avail.

You read it right: It took a YEAR to fix something that would have taken a man in a space suit five seconds. That's why robot probes are only marginally useful in exploration. If you want to truly investigate a thing, you have to put a man there. Hands and eyeballs can accomplish a thousand times what a remote robot can in a fraction of the time. Until we put people on the surface, it's all just so much astronomical masturbation.

Yes, the cost is orders of magnitude higher, but so is the return on investment. Which is why, I am convinced, the first boots on Mars will be put there by a private corporation. Like the early explorers of the New World, if you can afford to send people there and plant your flag, it belongs to you by default -- because nobody else can get there. Oh, you can be sure that various activist organizations and government entities, being by their natures full to overflowing with lazy and useless people who can't hack it in the private sector, will squawk and hoot and holler about it, but in the end there is fuck-all they can actually do about it.

If the last week has demonstrated anything, it's that governments around the world are past due to be taken down a few notches. Their arrogance is starting to interfere with the natural progression of life, and that simply won't do at all. Like NASA's robots, governments slow things down rather than making them work better. From time to time, We The People have to put them back in their place as servants rather than masters.