Now, is it worth the astronomical sums of money required to send humans into space, or should we just rely on robots that can perform most of the tasks? "The Russians and Americans may have ended their rivalry beyond Earth, but another contest for dominance in space remains, one that pits biology and brains against circuits and chips" (Stenger 1). Why should NASA continue with manned space exploration as opposed to going with strictly unmanned exploration?

May 25, 1961 in a speech to Congress about "Urgent National Needs," President John F. Kennedy unve

It's true that we could send robots into space more cheaply and more safely, but we also could drop robots onto the top of Mount Everest and call it reaching the summit....If we forget how important it is to be there, life willeventually be reduced to a meaningless video game. (1)

iled project Apollo, in which the United States would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade (Launius 8). Kennedy justified this expedition in 1962 in his speech in which he said, "We choose to go to the moon...and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard..." (qtd. in Brownback 15). July 20, 1989, President George H. W. Bush Gave the nations space program a new challenge, one to go to Mars and to "go where no one has gone before" (John F. Kennedy qtd. in Beason 156).

One benefit of the manned space program was that they were able to repair the Hubble space telescope and improve its vision. Before the maintenance, it was merely a floating piece of space junk, but now it is a scientific treasure (Stenger 3). Even if manned space exploration isn't reasonable, astronauts will still be needed to perform repairs of our vast web of orbiting satellites that provide us with television programing and long range communication (Krauthammer 1).

"I personally that to keep thriving, the human race must go on expanding and exploring new frontiers. If we are doomed to remain on this planet, we will eventually die out" (Marc Buie, qtd. in Stenger 4). Manned exploration is about discovering what lies beyond the next hill more than it is about making scientific breakthroughs. "You don't say, I will accept an incre

Some topics in this essay:
Don Pettit, Stenger1 Unmanned, Marc Buie, Ken Bowersox, Soviet Union, Buie Manned, WMAP Probe, Russians Americans, NIV Psalm, Sean O'Keefe, manned exploration, manned space, qtd stenger, space exploration, manned space exploration, space program, stenger 3, stenger 4, stenger 1, exploration human, human nature, qtd stenger 3, marc buie qtd, manned exploration human, stenger 3 manned,