For years, whenever the endless debate of robots vs humans in space came up, I was absolutely sure of my stance. Bone-deep, stubbornly sure. Send the humans. Send the geologists with cracked fingernails and curious eyes. Send the poets, even. I always believed that no rover, no matter how clever, could ever read a Martian outcrop the way a trained human mind can. I’ve defended that idea at conferences, on the pages of Free AstroScience, and late at night in my Rimini apartment with a cold espresso going colder beside me. And yet, here I am on this quiet Thursday morning—June 18, 2026—ready to admit I was wrong. Or, at least, ready to change my mind.
The Crack In My Old Belief
Let me be honest with you, the way I’d be honest with a friend over dinner. I haven’t abandoned my faith in human explorers. I’ve just watched the bills come in.
Every crewed mission has to be 99% safe — and rightly so, because losing astronauts isn’t just a tragedy, it’s a political earthquake that grounds programmes for years. Each space shuttle flight cost roughly $450 million . Estimates for sending humans to Mars run from tens of billions to a full $1 trillion . That’s not exploration. That’s a hostage situation, with our curiosity as the hostage.
The Moon keeps drifting. Mars stays a mirage. And the romance? The romance is being suffocated by spreadsheets.
What Changed: The Machines Got Smart
Here’s what I couldn’t have said ten years ago without lying.
Robots are simply better at surviving out there. They don’t need oxygen, food, water, or the delicate microbial company we drag around inside our guts . They shrug off radiation that would shred us. They don’t get homesick at month eighteen. And when one fails — and some will fail — nobody holds a state funeral.
At the start of the space race, humans were the smarter machine. Then we built technology that slowly, steadily, upped the robot game . The line keeps moving. The robots keep catching up. In some narrow tasks, they’ve already overtaken us.
Think of Mars Pathfinder, which sent back a flood of data and images for just $265 million . Think of Curiosity, Perseverance, the Chinese Tianwen-1, the Emirati Al-Amal — all arriving and working without a single funeral, a single grieving family.
The Geology Argument I Used To Win With
I used to lean hard on Frances Westall’s line: “A human geologist can do in a week what the Mars rovers can do in a year” . It’s true. It’s still true today.
But notice the verb tense. Can do. Today.
Lunar and Martian geology is, frankly, a much simpler beast than Earth’s. No rainforests. No tectonic chaos hidden under oceans. No 4 billion years of biology rewriting every rock. What you need out there is a sharp eye, pattern recognition, and the ability to correlate weird signals into a story. Those are precisely the things modern AI is learning fast — and in narrow domains, doing better than we do .
The argument that humans are irreplaceable rests, quietly, on the current limits of robotic technology . That’s a shaky pedestal.
A Fleet, Not A Flagship
Here’s where my imagination starts running.
Picture this: not one precious, gold-plated rover that mission control babies for a decade. Picture hundreds. A swarm. Cheap, redundant, expendable, the way SpaceX treats Starlink satellites. Some die on landing. Some flip in a sand dune. Most live, and they talk to each other, share findings, correct each other’s mistakes, and coordinate like a flock of metal starlings.
You couldn’t do that with humans. You wouldn’t dare.
And these machines could go where no astronaut will ever set foot — the sulphuric clouds of Venus, the cryo-volcanoes of Enceladus, the methane lakes of Titan. After a decade of swarm exploration, we wouldn’t bring home a few precious grams of regolith. We’d bring back kilos. Tonnes. Selected by AI that knows exactly what’s interesting and what’s just another basalt.
That’s not a small upgrade. That’s a different civilisation talking to the Solar System.
So Why A Lunar Base In 2028?
This is the question that haunts me at night, between the hum of my wheelchair charger and the muffled sound of the Adriatic outside.
If we’re sending hundreds of intelligent robots to Mars in the 2030s, what exactly is the point of planting boots on the Moon in 2028? Prestige? A photograph? A flag? Building a manned base on the Moon makes very little practical sense — unmanned spacecraft can study it perfectly well, as Lunar Prospector already showed . It is not our destiny to build a Moon colony any more than it is to walk on our hands .
That last line isn’t mine — I borrowed it because it stings in exactly the right way.
What I Refuse To Give Up
And yet.
I can’t fully sign Abney’s contract. I can’t quite say machines only, humans stay home, end of story . Because something in me, the same something that survived the surgeries and the long nights and the years of being told what my body couldn’t do, still believes in the overview effect.
Six hundred and fifty million people watched the lunar landing not for the data, but to witness the broadening of human experience . Robots don’t feel awe. They don’t write poetry about Valles Marineris. They don’t come home changed, and they don’t change the rest of us through their changing .
The argument for human spaceflight isn’t really scientific. It’s cultural, spiritual, almost religious. It’s about who we become when we go.
The Truth I’m Settling Into
So where do I actually land, after all this thinking out loud?
Probably here: two agencies, two budgets, two missions . One that floods the Solar System with smart, cheap, swarming robots — the real engine of discovery. Another, smaller and slower, that prepares humans for the long, expensive, glorious work of actually living out there . Not competing. Not feeding off each other’s funding. Just doing different jobs, well.
Robots will do most of the science. They already do . We should stop pretending otherwise.
But humans should keep going too — not because we’re efficient, but because we’re the species that needs to be there to know what being there means.
A Note From My Wheelchair In Rimini
I’ll tell you something personal, and then I’ll stop.
I spend a lot of time thinking about bodies that don’t quite cooperate with the world they’re placed in. Mine doesn’t. Astronauts’ bodies don’t either, really — space wasn’t designed for us. So when I argue that we should send robots first, in their thousands, and humans later, in careful handfuls, I’m not arguing against the human body. I’m arguing for being honest about what it can and can’t do, and finding tools that extend us rather than betray us.
Never give up has never meant insist on doing it the hard way for its own sake. It means find the way that actually works, and keep going.
Maybe that’s the real shift. Not robots versus humans. Just smarter humans, finally, choosing the right tool for the right rock.
The Solar System is waiting. Let’s send the swarm. Then let’s follow.
— Gerd, from a balcony in Rimini, watching the Adriatic do what it’s done for millions of years, while the future quietly recalculates itself overhead.
