It appears, according to NASA Watch, that my skepticism yesterday was justified.

Keith Cowing doesn't believe that NASA is going to announce a manned mission to Mars this week. He thinks that the notion that there will be is a misinterpretation of the press conference announcing the water discovery, that was mindlessly echoed among general-interest reporters who are not very, to put it gently, savvy on matters of either space science or space policy.

What? The media is unreliable? (Gasp!) I'm deeply shocked to hear this...Mr. Cowing does not get the credit he deserves.

Mr. Whitehouse at the BBC has now just put up an article saying that he doesn't think NASA will send humans as a result of the water...his earlier article was what sparked several news companies to claim that NASA was going to announce such a mission on Thursday. He still does not credit NASAWATCH, and this entire episode serves to show just how unreliable and dishonest news companies everywhere can be. Don't believe everything you read!

Sorry, it's Dr. Whitehouse, not Mr. Whitehouse.

Another screwed up Mars probe...
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992330

I wish it were politically possible to have a vigorous space program without manned missions at all. But, people need heroes to cheer for, and pretty Hubble pictures--color enhanced, please--to keep their interest. My personal wish is for a Galileo type probe in orbit around every significant body in the solar system.

Why? What's wrong with manned missions?

I think you are missing the point of human space flight (at least, from the perspective of a supporter of human space flight). On the scientific side, humans can do far more detailed and thorough investigations than robots when the objectives are fairly broad, such as a Mars mission. Robots are better when designed for an extremely specific purpose. Send a robot to the Rocky Mountains and you will never find dinosaur bones, but they are there...

Other than science alone, current human space missions will (eventually) lead to a time when we have space tourism, lunar observatories, and a Mars colony. In the long run, space flight in general is about the same thing that all other exploration has been about - expansion. Only this time, there are no native peoples for us to disturb.

It just seems to me that the most successful unmanned programs that we've had so far have been much more productive in terms of pure scientific discovery than have most of the manned missions. I'm thinking specifically of the Voyagers rendering a generation of textbooks obsolete, versus anything that was happening in the manned program at that time. I mean, sending a fifth grade class's collection of seedling garden cups up on the space shuttle is just PR, essentially.

I wouldn't necessarily agree that we'd never know about dinosaurs if we sent robots to Colorado. People were there for thousands of years and had no inkling of the remains in the stone. Yet now we do, and now we have imaging devices that can "see" a fossil beneath solid rock. Similar advances in technology ought to provide similar advances over human perception in planetary exploration, too.

That presumes that the only reason that we do space is for science. Simply put, it's not, though many like to pretend that it is.

But even if that's the case, it's not true that unmanned missions are more productive. They're just more cost effective (i.e., you get more science for the dollar). But you can do a lot more science, in absolute terms, with a human in situ, than with a pre-programmed machine. And note, the people living in Colorado for centuries weren't looking for fossils. Had they been scientists, trained and motivated to do so, they would have. We simply don't yet have instrumentation required to do that unmanned, and autonomously.

The science return from our unmanned probes seems tremendous, because we knew almost nothing before we sent them. But compared to what we'd learn if we sent people, it's trivial.