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Comment by robg | Hacker News Reader

Everything you say can be applied to the history of humans on the Earth’s moon. 50 years later you’ve been proven wrong. Robots are better and cheaper at space exploration and humans being in the loop have only made things more expensive and more risky. The failures of human space adventures have made things much harder on space budgets. See also the Shuttle program, after Apollo.

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But nothing interesting has really happened on the moon since the initial landings, so it’s not surprising that interest has dried up. There’s no colony, no space casino resort, nothing that is a big leap from the initial achievement.

The simple fact of the matter is that no one really cares about robots exploring the universe. Humans care about humans, not probes.

That’s neither simple nor a fact. Space exploration has almost all been robots, telescopes, probes, etc. The interest has been self-sustaining with an endless stream of discoveries, discoveries including still Voyager.

And the average person has almost no interest in it, except for world-history events like the first landing on the Moon. The first landing on Mars would be a similar event.

Sustained funding for 60 years shows the continued interest in there, to use one of the “reasons” you cite for Apollo.

You think there would've been more interest if the Apollo program had never happened, and we'd just done it all with robots?

The last 60 years have shown the interest is there without humans AND having humans in the loop dying have deeply impaired progress based on limited resources and their allocation.

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