Because human beings are remarkably capable, especially the best and the brightest. There's a great paper called the "dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency." https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article-abstract/53/2/2.22... // https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/RobotMyth.pdf

Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.

But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ, and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity is much harder. Humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.

So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.

▲ teraflop an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How does any of that matter for this mission, which will not be landing on the moon?

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JumpCrisscross 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> How does any of that matter for this mission

This is a fair question. The closest answer I can get is eyes and ears onboard complement sensors.

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TeMPOraL 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

It's also rehearsing/testing/experience gathering for an eventual mission that will land people on the Moon again. Missions don't happen in isolation.

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JumpCrisscross 10 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Missions don't happen in isolation

True. I wasn’t thinking about training the ground crews.

	▲	TeMPOraL a minute ago \| parent [-]
		Only in the last few minutes, the livestream actually covered various goals this mission - explicitly a test mission - is meant to achieve. For example, one they just mentioned is they're going to be doing some docking maneuvers practice. This is not just training the current flight crew and ground crews, but is also generally testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc. With possible exception of Falcon 9 launches, space missions are still infrequent enough that each of them is providing knowledge and experience meaningfully relevant to all work in and adjacent to space exploration and space industry.

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tekla 14 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

To test the stuff that will allow to land humans on the moon

▲ dekhn an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troctolite_76535 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt#NASA_career)?

	▲	areoform 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, and more! `> Apollo was over three orders of magnitude more efficient in producing scientific papers per day of fieldwork than are the MERs. This is essentially the same as Squyres’ (2005) intuitive estimate given above, and is consistent with the more quantitative analogue fieldwork tests reported by Snook et al. (2007).` Scientific papers are a pretty poor measure of productivity so here's another one. We know about the existence of He-3 thanks to samples brought back from astronauts on the moon. Astronauts setup fiddly UV telescope experiments on the moon, trying to set up a gravimeter to measure gravitational waves, digging into the soil to put explosive charges at different ranges for seismic measurement of the moon's subsurface... They were extremely productive. Most of what we know about the moon happened thanks to the 12 days spent on the lunar surface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Ultraviolet_Camera/Spectro... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Surface_Gravimeter