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Human spaceflight: is it worth the money and risk?
As the Science Museum celebrated the birth of the Space Age with its landmark Cosmonauts exhibition, Roger Highfield hosted a discussion with the UK's first astronaut Helen Sharman, Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, space scientist Monica Grady and The Sky at Night's Chris Lintott.
Does the low cost and practicality of robotic probes now outweigh the inspirational value of seeing human beings voyage across the solar system, or does the future of our species lie in space, as Russia’s Cosmists believed more than a century ago?
This debate on the relative values of crewed and uncrewed space exploration was presented in partnership with the Science Museum.