Astronaut Ken Mattingly, who flew to the moon on Apollo 16, has died at 87

My younger brother and I watched Apollo 13 over and over. For me Ken Mattingly exemplified what it meant (and means) to be an astronaut.

This quote was interesting

He retired from the space agency in 1985 and the next year from the Navy as a rear admiral. Later he began to question the high cost of human space exploration. He told NPR that robots are so good now, NASA needs to define questions that can only be answered by a human presence. "Would it be exciting? Oh sure it would," he said, "but how many billions of dollars are we going to spend on exciting things for one or two people to enjoy? And if it doesn't lead anywhere."

I think machines/robots are great as a scalable data collection device. But if we want it to be affordable to put lots of humans in space, we need to put humans in space and work out the kinks.