I think we should place astronauts and all earth people into indestructible suits. Then we could do away with osha and save lots of money. For that matter, we should outlaw, football, skydiving, guns, meat processing plants and malted milk balls.

Editorials calling for a halt to manned space flight are just a typical knee-jerk reaction by the media, and should not be taken seriously.

The future of space exploration will probably continue in much the same way as it has over the last 40 years, with a combination of both robots and manned missions. As much in favour of robots as I am, human explorers are still far better at making rational judgements and adapting to changing contingencies than robots are and this is likely to remain the case for the forseeable future. Nasa people still describe humans as "the ultimate sensor platform".

With present technology robots can be designed to carry out specific experiments under predefined conditions, but this is not always the best (nor the most economical) way to do science. A classic example is the Viking mars landers from the 1970s. They were equipped with a number of experiments designed to determine whether the martian soil contained living organisms, but the results obtained were rather inconclusive. A human with a microscope would have resolved the issue in a short space of time.

I'd like to see robots used to build habitable environments - such as space stations and biospheres - ready for later occupation by human astronauts.

As humanoid robots are becoming popular, i am wondering when honda will make a telepresence suit one could wear to control the robot directly.

I have seen some video of a nasa upper torso that was designed to mimic a slave system on earth, with the goal of allowing somebody on earth to work in space... the robot would stay up there launched once, the shifts nown here could rotate, and no life support would be needed. I think we will see this in action soon.