Send robots to Mars as cost-saving mission

Artificial intelligence can effectively replace humans on space voyages, argues the Astronomer Royal

‘We can have flotillas of small robotic spacecraft equipped with AI exploring the whole system’

ROBOTS should be sent on missions to Mars instead of humans because they are cheaper, Britain’s most senior astronomer has said.

Lord Rees of Ludlow, the Astronomer Royal, believes there is little justification for spending billions of dollars of public cash on sending astronauts to other planets when it will soon be easier, cheaper and just as effective to send artificially intelligent machines. His intervention comes after Nasa was forced to postpone its Artemis I mission, which was due to launch on Monday and will mark the first renewed effort to put humans on the Moon for 50 years.

The US space agency hopes to establish a base in lunar orbit and wants to use it as a launching platform for further crewed missions, including to Mars, with the Moon becoming something of a galactic pit stop.

“Maybe there’s a case for sending some people back to the Moon, as something symbolic, but I think there’s no case for publicly funded flights to Mars with human beings,” Lord Rees told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“No one’s thinking we’ll send people to Mars in less than 20 years from now and, by then, I think we can be confident of further advances which will mean that the machines can do the geology and anything else as well as a human, and the cost gap is enormous, probably about a factor of 100.”

Artemis I was scrubbed because of leaking hydrogen, cooling issues and a concerning crack. It will go into lunar orbit after it launches, with the next available take-off window this Friday.

The follow-up crewed mission, Artemis II, will take humans further from Earth than ever before, and the subsequent Artemis III will put astronauts back on the Moon by 2025.

The last person to set foot on the Moon was Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan in December 1972.

“I’m slightly ambivalent to be honest,” Lord Rees said when asked about the importance of Artemis I.

“It’s clear to those of us who are old enough to remember Neil Armstrong’s first small step ... that was a really heroic, high-risk adventure.

“Technology was very primitive then, by our standards, and this won’t be quite the same achievement as it was to do this 50 years ago.”

The advent and rapid progress of robots and artificial intelligence, he said, “weakens the practical case” for taking people to the Moon.

Lord Rees also took issue with Nasa’s “propaganda”, which claimed various projects would be done on the surface of the Moon, including mining, geology and setting up telescopes, when robots could do as much at a lower price.

Nasa’s Artemis project will reportedly cost United States taxpayers a total of $93billion (£80billion).

Lord Rees suggested that public funds should be reduced from such endeavours so that the private sector can take the baton up for human space exploration, as pet projects backed by billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos can afford to “take higher risks and do cut-price projects”.

He claimed that Nasa is “rather risk averse”, which can lead to bloated project bills. “I think the future of human spaceflight is to be done by the private sector, billionaires and sponsors, etcetera, who can afford to take higher risks, and do cut price projects, taking only the kind of people who are prepared to go on a dangerous adventure.

“And good luck to them. We’ll cheer them on,” he said.

While Lord Rees stopped short of the idea of establishing permanent colonies beyond Earth, saying it was “very unlikely for the foreseeable future”, he did outline a future where Jupiter’s vast moons could be inhabited by robots – something a human could never do.

“We can have flotillas of small robotic spacecraft equipped with AI exploring the whole system,” he said.