Its time to stop messing around with human spaceflight and send in the robots. Not just a few more space probes and surface rovers. We should be building fleets of robots. Swarms of robots. Hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of robots. Robots in low earth orbit, assembling solar power stations. Robots exploring the surface of the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and the outer planets and their moons. Balloon-bots floating in the atmosphere of Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Orbital surveyors mapping planets and asteroids for resources. There’s so much we can learn so quickly, and for a comparative bargain.

I love NASA, and I love spaceflight. I think its just awesome. When I was in 6th grade I wrote an essay about how I was going to live on a space station when I was in my 30s. I still pay attention to space shuttle launches. I got teary eyed watching a recording of the Apollo 11 launch on YouTube. I get a little emotional every time a human escapes the Earth’s gravity well, even if it’s just to climb up to Low Earth Orbit and mess around for a while before coming back to the surface.

But please, let’s stop screwing around with human spaceflight, at least for the next couple of decades. Its difficult, expensive, and we freak out every time somebody dies in an accident. Robots, on the other hand, don’t mind boredom, high accelerations, the harsh vacuum of space, and (best of all) they’re expendable. Even the launch vehicles are cheaper to build because we can tolerate failures.

Everything we can possibly do in space except actually go there we can do with robots. So let’s do it!