The point is, human spaceflight will NEVER be an seen as an intrical part of exploration. This is why we need top be talking colonization – you can’t do colonization without humans.

— Donald

However, I don’t think the VSE intends to draw a distinction between exploration and science. Thomas Jefferson certainly didn’t when he charged Merriweather Lewis to visit with key scientists of the day before embarking on his expedition. The main goal of the expedition was to ascertain the resources associated with the Louisiana Purchase and facilitate economic expansion into this new frontier. (Sound familiar?) For this reason, Lewis applied a scientific perspective to all his observations to ensure that accurate conclusions could be drawn from what at the time was a significant national investment.

Another example is the oil industry. It is no coincidence that this industry is the largest employer of geologists and geophysicists in the world. Exploration for new reserves and energy sources demands the thoroughness of scientific observation and techniques to accurately assess new reserves and opportunities for economic development.

Therefore, the ongoing debate on whether science or exploration should take precedence is pointless. It also opens up VSE to criticism that it is just a gee-whiz joy ride for future astronauts, which it is not. The real issue is that NASA’s exploration efforts, all of which rely on science, are being re-vectored from accruing knowledge for knowledge’s sake to accruing knowledge that could lead to the eventual utilization and economic development of space. Science is at the heart of accruing knowledge in either case.

As I have argued, the idea that science can occur in the absense of exploration, while not quite entirely wrong, is so limiting as to be meaningless. We have leaned a few facts about Mars, and less about the other planets, with our robots. But, it is a safe bet that we will not understand these worlds — in any sense of the term “understand” — until scientists and other people have walked and lived on these worlds. People who believe otherwise simply are not living in the real world.

Sending any conceivable clockwork robot into the Grand Canyon, while it might give you a few facts, in no way would allow you to “understand” the Grand Canyon. That takes geologists on site with the ability to explore a significant fraction of the canyon, to take photographs influenced by the emotional experience of being in the local environment, and to paint pictures and write symphonies. No robotic exploration could have allowed Antonin Dvorak to write the “New World” Symphony, yet this symphony was every bit as important as “scientific” facts in explaining the new world to the Europeans who stayed at home. No robot could have taken Muir’s photos of the Sierra Nevada mountains, which, again, were a vital part of our “understanding” of the West.

All of this is no less true of other worlds.

Science must support exploration and thus more science, or it is essentially and fundamentally meaningless.

— Donald