On Sun, 2 Oct 2005 17:40:19 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Henry Spencer) made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:

In article .com,
zoltan wrote:
I think it would be much more efficient to encapsulate the astronauts
in a confortable robotic vehicle that has manipulator arms to collect
samples, air conditioning, life support, communications, consumables,
motors, etc. We already have a lot of experience with such vehicles
from undersea exploration.

Yes, and they're distinctly clumsy and difficult to get things done in;
they're used underwater simply because there's no good alternative.

For space, the idea has been suggested many times, but to date, hands and
feet simply work better.

Yes, though they'd work even better if NASA would invest a small
fraction of the amount that it spends on launch vehicle development
and operations into better EVA hardware...