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Comment by chrismealy | Hacker News Reader

That was completely unconvincing. Sending people to the moon was a mistake. Totally a job for robots.

They didn't have robots in 1969, at least nothing that could do almost anything useful. They did send a bunch of automated probes to orbit and the Moon back in those days, and most of them failed because the tech was so poor, and the few that didn't fail didn't do much useful science anyway.

To be clear, Venera 7 landed on Venus and transmitted data in 1970. We did have robots (probes, landers) that while crude by today's standards, did serve a scientific purpose.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera

Venera 7 lasted less than an hour and only transmitted one or two crappy images, along with some sensor data. Granted, humans can't do any better on the surface of Venus due to the temperature and pressure, but humans can do far better than that on the Moon with ~1969 technology, and they did. Humans brought back many kilograms of rock samples, they set up a bunch of experiments, they drove around for hours on a buggy (in the later landings, not Apollo 11); they did FAR more than any lander of the time could possibly have done.

I'm thrilled that we went to the moon, and am glad we did. Venera is just an example of a possible alternative to what we chose to do by sending humans in that era. Less science for less money.

1969 space technology was the result of a mandate to get humans on the moon. A mandate to get robots on the moon would have likely radically increased the ability of these robots to collect data as compared to what Venera accomplished.

I'm still +1 for human exploration.

You're forgetting that we already sent landers to the Moon before we sent people. We didn't get much out of them. We just didn't have the technology, and the public wasn't going to be excited by a campaign that went like this: "it's too dangerous and expensive to send people to the Moon, so we're going to invest a ton of money into robotics technology so we can send robots there in 40 years!" A mandate to put robots there any faster wouldn't have worked; we just didn't have the technology. We developed a lot of our current computing technology IN the Apollo program itself, so the reason our computer-driven automation is so good these days is because we did send people to the Moon, instead of waiting and hoping for technology to improve.

First of all, we don't have a general purpose robot that can reliably fill even an entry-level fast food position in 2017, never mind 1969. But send a fry-cook to the moon and they'll get more science done in a day than a rover could do in a week.

Second of all, WHEN would you like the humans to go? How many robots should we send before we get the privilege to go there? Should we have stayed in Africa forever while only sending robots to the rest of Earth?

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