The Unexamined Space Program

Jon Goff writes:

If space transportation was as free and healthy of a market as most other markets, I don’t think anyone would care about robots vs humans. It would be so obvious that the answer is “depends on what you want to do” that nobody would even ask the question. The saddest thing about the mainstream robots vs humans debate is that it isn’t really a robots vs humans debate at all, but merely people arguing over who gets the pork.

Yes. Unfortunately, we continue to fail to ask that fundamental question: what do we want to do in space?