b.cognosco

[...] "Any specific mission you can identify to do in space, you can design and build an unmanned space craft to do it more effectively, more economically and more safely," said Alex Roland, a professor of history at Duke University and for eight years a historian at NASA. Manned space flights are more about capturing the public's imagination than science, he said. "It's circus, it's just pure circus." [...] [WSJ Online]

By this philosophy we don't actually need doctors, history professors, or even steering wheels in cars. Let's just have machines do it all. It was a dumb thing to say.