[Tyler]

Hawking on Manned vs Robotic Space Missions
     







Steven Hawking chimes in on the debate about whether to spend
valuable resources sending humans on planetary exploration missions, or
to use robots.
After all, it's a lot cheaper to send a machine that doesn't need
oxygen, isn't sensitive to radiation, and doesn't need to be returned to
their family at the end of the mission.
But there are some legitimate scientific reasons to send humans
including real-time tweaking of the chemistry experiments looking for
life, and to initiate unplanned tests based on unexpected observation.
Also, the tax-paying public gets more emotionally invested in human
missions and would possibly be more willing to continue funding.
The ultimate answer is likely a mixture of the two, but exactly what
that mixture will be is still being hotly debated.

   

http://robots.net/article/3001.html
     

[TrueAndroids]

Mixed seems the direction they are heading. NASA and GM have teamed up to build androids for space missions. I guess the benefit of androids is that we can use the same ships, housing, tools, etc. so less duplication of effort. First the androids go up to the moon in the space ships, and then the same space ships can later take humans due to similar design.

GM and NASA Take Giant Leap in Robotic Technology
"Using leading edge control, sensor and vision technologies, NASA and GM engineers and scientists came together at NASAs Johnson Space Center to build a new dexterous humanoid robot (Robonaut2, or R2 for short) capable of working side by side with people whether that means helping GM create safer cars and safer manufacturing plants or assisting NASA astronauts on dangerous space missions."

See it here

[Freddy]

Nice point about the same craft being re-usable by androids or humans...hadn't thought of that...

[Art]

Instead of an android being on board as in a bio-mechanical, humanistic, semi-robotic form, et. al., I simply envisioned a very omniscient computer system, being in control of various ships functions as well as the project's mission.

Actually this is not far removed from our quite paranoid, "humans are expendable", HAL from 2001.

Properly programmed and outfitted, it could perform such a mission with relative ease. Speech Synthesis, Voice Recognition and Computer Vision would really ice the cake!!

We'll just have to stay tuned for this one!