The first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes.

There's a fundamental problem with unmanned stuff - moving parts break. So for instance Curiosity's "drill" broke after 7 activations. It took 2 years of extensive work by a team full of scientists to create a work-around that's partially effective (which really begs a how many ... does it take to screw in a light bulb joke). A guy on the scene with a toolkit could have repaired it to perfection in a matter of minutes. And the reason I put drill in quotes is because it's more like a glorified scraper. It has a max depth of 6cm. We're rather literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer.

Another example of the same problem is in just getting to places. You can't move too fast for the exact same reasons, so Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h). So it takes it about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area, meaning you want human feedback with about a 40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. I'm also leaving out the fact that the tires have also, as might be expected, broken. So it's contemporary traveling speed is going to be even slower.

Just imagine trying to explore Earth traveling around at 1 mile a year and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm! And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future.

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Beyond all of this, there are no "moral problems" in manned spaceflight. It's risky and will remain risky. If people want to pursue it, that's their choice. And manned spaceflight is extremely inspiring, and really demonstrates what man is capable of. Putting a man on the Moon inspired an entire generation to science and achievement. The same will be true with the first man on Mars. NASA tried to tap into this with their helicopter drone on Mars but people just don't really care about rovers, drones, and probes.

Eventually you cannot run high risks in unmanned. If a rocket fails getting a satellite to orbit just build a new one. However missions to the outer planets are often only possible once every several hundred years (when orbits line up) and so if you fail you can't retry. Mars you get a retry every year and a half (though you get about a month). If you want to hit 5 planets that is a several hundred year event. And the trip time means if you fail once you reach the outer planet all the engineers who knew how the system works have retired and so you start from scratch on the retry (assuming you even get the orbits to line up)

You're saying the same thing he is, but with more precise examples. There were also plenty of more useless requirements which is what he was getting at with it being 'designed by committee.' It was also intended to be a 'space tug' to drag things to new orbits, especially from Earth to the Moon, and this is also where its reusable-but-not-really design came from.

It's also relevant that the Space Shuttle came as a tiny segment of what was originally envisioned as a far grander scheme (in large part by Werner von Braun) of complete space expansion and colonization. The Space Shuttle's origins are from the Space Transportation System [1], which was part of a goal to have humans on Mars by no later than 1983. Then Nixon decided to effectively cancel human space projects after we won the Space Race, and so progress in space stagnated for the next half century and we were left with vessels that had design and functionality that no longer had any real purpose.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Transportation_System

There is nothing wrong with solid rocker boosters for that application. The issue is they failed to figure out figure out the limits and launched when it was too cold. (they also should have investigated when they saw unexpected non-fatal seal issues)

Solid boosters are more complex and so Saturn could not have launched on time if they tried them. So for Saturn with a (arbitrary) deadline not doing them was the right call. Don't confuse right call with best call though: we know on hindsight that Saturn launched on time, nobody knows what would have happened if they had used solid boosters.

He is talking about Falcon 1, not CCDev. There was no close call at CCDev, nor any grant money for Falcon 1.