My questions is:  Why send <i>humans</i> at all? (initially) - Instead of just <i>robots</i> -- Especially on the Moon: Remote operation is pretty feasible there, with minimal AI "smoothing" sufficient.<br>- Sending humans early seems to me like extreme risk, low reward behavior...<br>- Sure, once stuff is tested and infrastructure established, <i>then</i> start sending humans.,(reply>), @Paul  I mean, fair, but are they really more expensive than all required to support humans, and the associated risk?<br>- And a lot of robots are really good, actually.  When remotely controlled. (possible in orbit, and even on the moon with survivable lag)<br>- They could probably do some repairs... but yeah, it is limited...<br>- Maybe if we need humans for <i>some</i> things, why not have them do everything, is the idea? ...<br>- And I'm not talking about rovers. We have lots of impressive robots, we are just not sending them to space...,(reply>), Because at the moment our robots suck. They cant do repairs, they arent very intelligent, they cant build things and run experiments. All we have are little rovers that roll around slowly and take pictures.