An internal NASA study group, tasked with replanning the agency’s beleaguered Mars programme, revealed on Tuesday that it was using this working scenario and date as a goal. The group has been tasked with finding ways of getting the human and robotic sides of NASA to work together more....

Tighter integration between human and robotic exploration is a very sensible goal. It is essential for accelerating our progress in space. It's disappointing that such a kludgy idea as this is what they came up with. It's completely backwards.

Taking samples on Mars, launching them to orbit and retrieving them to Earth is all easily handled by robotics. The only sensible part of that for human involvement is in the selection of samples. Trained human judgement and on-the-spot observations would make an appreciable difference in the value of the samples collected. A skilled geologist could spot better targets in minutes than could a robot guided through many hours of lag-time instructions.

We need a few people on the ground, each directing three or five small semi-autonomous robots that are capable of thoroughly exploring small areas, building databases of basic info that geologists can use to select the most promising places to visit personally. Collect maybe ten times as many samples as can be sent home, ship a representative group back during the next Earth transfer window (storing the rest for follow-up investigation should it be desired)... and the people stay, and continue exploring, at least until the next group arrives.

As far as the first manned mission to Mars being an orbit-and-return trip, as was done with Apollo... that's just not going to be politically and economically feasible. It's going to be challenging enough to get Congress to commit the money; they are going to insist on planting flags. It's not even necessary to do so for testing the technology. There are not nearly as many unknowns going to Mars as there were in going to the Moon.

My own personal recommendations:

• Do the first sample return entirely robotically (preferably much sooner than current plans would make feasible). Launching from the surface of Mars and returning to Earth is the big testing need, and we don't need humans present for that.

• Build a new space station in Earth orbit to test the long-term effects of 1/3 gravity on the human body. We only need a few modules rotating on long tethers to do this. (Ideally we would also have some people at the right radius to test 1/6 for Luna as well.)

• Build another new station to be a fuel depot and "workbench" for assembling spacecraft too large to be single-launch lifted from our planet's surface. We could build craft much safer and more accommodating for long-duration manned missions, assemble space stations and labs for other nations (and even corporations) who want their own, put together deep-space robotic probes more advanced than what we currently send out... and handle other useful tasks such as managing reusable tugs for placing/maintaining satellites.

I'm excited at the prospects of meeting the challenges of putting people on Mars, but what I really want to do is focus on building off-planet infrastructure that would make all such challenges less challenging. There are lively arguments over the value of sending up people to do "science in space". Maybe the problem is that we should be putting a lot more emphasis on learning to get good at engineering in space.