Quote:
Originally posted by Urbane Guerrilla
He can fix the damn robot without a light-hour's signal lag, for one thing. Manned missions are expensive, yes, but you buy flexibility with that, and with it, survivability. In a hostile environment, that's beyond price.
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That man on Mars would be standing around waiting for someone on earth to deduce the problem, and then wait more while a man on earth erased the defective EEPROM. Men on Mars could not fix any of it. Show me the last time you reprogrammed an EEPROM in your disk drive? And you have access to more equipment than a man on Mars?
What is the most flexible solution? Wait for new code from Asia for your drive - or wait for the next spacecraft with new hardware? Where is the flexibility?
Things worked just fine because some dumb human (or Martian) mechanic did not stick his hand under the hood to fix it. The best place to fix it was from earth. All that Martian 'flexibility' would only have made things worse - and more expensive.