/sci/ - Science & Math

The nearest future of spaceflight and especially colonization belongs to robots. You would be delusional to deny the obvious. Autonomous robots are becoming a thing, the space industry will soon adopt all the innovation we already have on Earth. And it's becoming increasingly clear that normies aren't interested in living outside of Earth, are sperging out at the slightest hint of danger to humans, and don't like any bad publicity in general. It's impossible to make any non-flag planting mission in these conditions, neither politically nor business-wise.

>b-but muh InSight and the mole
>b-but a human would have done it in 5 minutes with a shovel
InSight is a low-budget mission (yeah... this is JPL/NASA and not ISRO, just think of how much they would have spent to get humans with shovels there) which is designed to do precisely one thing. Space industry didn't adopt all the innovations we have here yet, because of the long development cycles. Chinese were the first to use autonomous landing hazard avoidance in 2013, JPL is finally doing that in 2020 (in case they don't miss the launch window). Robotic exploration, construction, and preparing the site for humans is the future.

In the next decade we'll see UGVs and/or autonomous aircraft mapping the Mars. That is my prediction, and I'm objectively right by all metrics.