

Yeah, but humans are impatient. Each rover has only a select set of tools. It can’t adapt to what it might find. It has to wait for another rover to be sent. To automate modifying the rovers will take a lot of hands on experience. Then ideally they could just ship up parts to be swapped in.




Right, but sending them say to the moon, to perfect the tech, then sending the tech to further places will drastically speed up the process. The moon is at least not too far away. Mars isn’t terrible either. But the overhead is high compared to the distance. So being able to iterate without a launch (human presence) is a big win. If we were talking saturn, then the gains start to diminish. So perfect it on the moon, maybe mars if there is some reason it is drastically different, then use it elsewhere. Maybe even send some outside the solar system. Though without significant improvements in propulsion, there isn’t a lot of point to sending outside the solar system.