Steven Weinberg, a University of Texas professor, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in nineteen seventy-nine. He says scientists have learned more from technology than humans in space.

STEVEN WEINBERG: “And when you have a facility that involves people, like the International Space Station, which is an order of magnitude more expensive than these unmanned observatories, no important science comes out of it.”

Professor Weinberg says robots can do much more on Mars than humans.

STEVEN WEINBERG: “For the trillion dollar cost of sending human beings to Mars, perhaps to just one location on Mars, we could have unmanned rovers wandering all over the planet.”

Charles Bolden has been NASA’s Administrator since two thousand nine. He told VOA the space agency is combining robotic and human activity on its missions to Mars.

CHARLES BOLDEN: “We are always talking about collaborative efforts between humans and robots. We can’t do any…there is no either/or. People like to talk about either/or. And it’s not an either/or – it’s a together. Collaboration between humans and robots are absolutely essential for any human exploration in the future. You know, if you want to, if you want to know what I think is going to happen – the first humans to land on Mars are going to go right into a habitat that’s already there for them and it will have been constructed by a robotic crew that went up and did it.”