Space, the painfully expensive frontier

All right, with Atlantis on its final flight and Discovery and Endeavour making their last runs later this year, we're going to have a mumble-mumble years gap in the USA until the next manned spacecraft, either Orion or more likely something else goes into service, leaving us using the Soyuz Taxi Service to the ISS for the foreseeable future.

But the question is, why are we going? What's up there for us that can't be just as easily done with robot probes? Yeah, going to Mars to look at rocks ourselves might produce data more quickly than with remote controlled probes, at an order magnitude greater expense and with the possibility several human being dying very far from home. So why go at all?

[Poll #1565947]