Due to advances in technology, there is now renewed interest in manned space flight. I hope I’m not alone in asking, “What’s the point?” For extraterrestrial scientific discovery, robots do a much better job at a significantly lower cost.
Tom Wolfe, in The Right Stuff, laid it all out. Sending astronauts up into space, during the Cold War, was a return to the medieval practice of single warrior combat. Rather than having whole swarms of fighters slashing and bludgeoning each other, the two opposing forces would, on occasion, send only their best champions to fight, one on one, while the rest would just watch and await a symbolic victory.
The Cold War, however, is over.
