Works for me with the Marianas Trench, or Antarctica. As a place to spend a lot of time, I much prefer New Zealand to Antarctica, and I’d much rather be on a ship in Micronesia than several miles underwater. But rocks and gravity seem to define exploration for many space enthusiasts.

“Eventually we will live and work there full time.”

Hey, no question about that. You can’t settle and colonize with robots! Colonization and settlement is off the table for telerobotics.

“The resources available in the solar system are incredible. How can we afford not to develop them?”

Well, unless you envision human miners with pickaxes, shovels, and big biceps, one might well do it telerobotically. We do loads of mining here on the Earth telerobotically. A lot of what Rio Tinto does is telerobotic. Who fixes the robots? Well, if they have a high degree of telerobotic dexterity at their command, humans still fix them, through telerobots they control. Here on Earth, human repair personnel are cheap, so we don’t need to do it that way.

“Surface systems are not entirely different than orbital habitats.”

Dust contamination and seal reliability, thermal control, power generation and storage … it’s going to be quite different down in the dust where the wind blows and the sun goes up and down. Nope, not “entirely different”, but still pretty different.

Sure, telerobotics requires telepresence. Mars orbital capability naturally comes before boots on the ground. But are we just gonna go 4/5 of the way to Mars and stop there? Because we couldn’t afford a few measly billions to develop a modular, general-purpose space habitat?

Surface systems are not entirely different than orbital habitats. All you need is a soft landing and your habitat modules can be located anywhere. They should be multi-purpose from the start, designed to work in LEO, at Lagrange points, on the Moon, then eventually on Phobos and Mars itself.

Science isn’t the only thing humans do in space. Eventually we will live and work there full time. The resources available in the solar system are incredible. How can we afford not to develop them?

Once humans are living and working in space, the science will follow. Then we can really answer those questions about what conditions were like on Mars 3 or 4 billion years ago.

From reading DB9’s comments, then reading the MASSIVE amount of links to data he supplies it is pretty easy to see who is trying to fertilze the soil here.

IF you spent the time to watch Administrator Bolden’s remarks on this he made a special point to retell his, he has went to the President and SPECICALLY asked about the date, as he felt it mean’t do not even begin thinking about it UNTIL 2015. The President told Bolden NASA should be ready to go by NO LATER than 2015.

If you did an honest assetment of what would have been funded in that budget our Nation would be in a lot better position with alot more tools in the tool box.

Closed loop life support
nuclear material production for RPG generators
nuclear power and propulsion
Fuel depot and transfer technology.
Domestic engines for heavy lift

To name just a very few … instead we are spending the money just to keep the brooms being pushed in the porkonauts districts building the never to be operational SLS/MPCV.

Yes, and it would have been if Congress hadn’t take the funding for them and funneled it to the Big Monster Rocket that has no mission. The next time you write something informed and intelligent will be the first, I think.

So after accusing me of “name calling [sic]” and “belittling”, what do you do?

You belittle me with sarcasm and call me “narcissistic”.

Pot, kettle, black?

Be careful. Someone might call you a hypocrite.