Are astronauts worth tens of billions of dollars in extra costs to go to Mars?

21.08.2023 - 11:51 / theunconventionalgardener.com / guest

Header image: What makes more sense: Sending a human or a robot to Mars? Credit: Juergen Faelchle/Shutterstock.com

As society contemplates going to the moon or Mars, there’s a rising debate as to whether it’s worth spending billions of dollars to send humans to other planets if a robot or rover can perform the necessary science.

I think NASA needs to send both humans and machines. Let me explain why.

I started off my 28-year career at NASA as an engineer on the shuttle training aircraft – an airborne simulator of the space shuttle. During my 17 years as an astronaut, I flew on three space missions. Two of those were shuttle missions, STS-117 and STS-119, to the International Space Station.

The main goal of both of these missions was to build the actual ISS, leaving little time for actual experiments. However, our mission was fulfilling because we were building a science laboratory in space. During my third mission, ISS Expedition 39 and 40, I spent five and a half months on the ISS.

While we were on board, my crewmates and I performed more than 300 different experiments. Some we did not touch, like the alpha magnetic spectrometer that scans the universe for antimatter. Others we set up and the mission controls then took over. For other experiments we set them up and performed the experiment. In some, we astronauts were the guinea pigs.

Hence, we used our time to squeeze the most science out of our ISS visit by collaborating with the scientists on the ground. Through this mix of human and automated experiments, NASA increased the amount of science being conducted on the ISS.

To try to compare scientific output between a crewed and a robotic mission, let me contrast the Apollo 17 – the last moon mission of December 1972, in