You get extremely diminishing returns with probes. There's only so much you can do from orbit. Rovers are substantially more useful, but are extremely expensive. Curiosity and Perseverance each cost more than $3 billion. As the technology advances and we get the basic infrastructure setup, humans will rapidly become much cheaper than rovers.
A big cost with rovers is the R&D and one-off manufacturing of the rover itself. With humans you have the added cost of life support, but 0 cost in manufacturing and development. The early human missions will obviously be extremely expensive as we pack in all the supplies to start basic industry (large scale Sabatier Reactions [1] will be crucial), energy, long-term habitation, and so on.
But eventually all you're going to need to be paying for is food/life support/medicine/entertainment/etc, which will be relatively negligible.
> You get extremely diminishing returns with probes. There's only so much you can do from orbit. Rovers are substantially more useful, but are extremely expensive.
I was talking about anything you can do without humans. Not just probes that stay in space.
> A big cost with rovers is the R&D and one-off manufacturing of the rover itself. With humans you have the added cost of life support, but 0 cost in manufacturing and development.
You could mass produce rovers.
The human life support is gonna be extremely expensive. So it's a bit silly to say that other than that, humans have 0 cost.
Rovers have the same '0 cost' component, from the humans remotely given them commands and guidance from earth.
A big cost with rovers is the R&D and one-off manufacturing of the rover itself. With humans you have the added cost of life support, but 0 cost in manufacturing and development. The early human missions will obviously be extremely expensive as we pack in all the supplies to start basic industry (large scale Sabatier Reactions [1] will be crucial), energy, long-term habitation, and so on.
But eventually all you're going to need to be paying for is food/life support/medicine/entertainment/etc, which will be relatively negligible.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction