There is no reason for humans to ever return to the moon. The cost and risks are not justified. Drones and robots can do anything that needs to be done. They don’t need to breathe, they don’t need to sleep, or eat.
I think it would be cool, and I don't know that I care if there's a "reason" to do it other than "human achievement".
I mean, there wasn't really a "reason" to go to the moon in the 60's either. I think I more or less agree with JFK on this:
"Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, 'Because it is there'. Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it"
I could try and find a lot of justifications about medical research or something, and those might be cool, but it would be dishonest if I pitched those as a "reason" to go, because I would want us to return even if those reasons weren't there.
If you haven’t heard it, Public Service Broadcasting used the JFK speech in their song “The Race for Space” from the album of the same name. If you’re even partially a space nerd, it’s worth a listen. Very inspirational and the final album track is relevant to todays news.
When Mallory climbed on Everest (and possibly summited) it was a big deal because it had never been done. When Hilary and Tenzing did it, it pushed human achievement forward.
Today people still do it, but it means nothing to anyone other than those people.
Going to the moon in the 60s was an impressive feat. It pushed the boundary forward. But that's all it did. There's literally nothing of value there.
Sure most of the people who saw that are dead, or will be in the next 20 years. So it will seem "cool" to the next generation. But selling "cool" to a congressional appropriations committee is a tough sell.
We aren't gonna colonize the moon (or indeed mars) because frankly it would be too expensive, and there's no point. There literally is nothing to gain from a colony in either place, and there's no way to fund it (and no reason to fund it.)
But you have to get a lot of other supplies to the moon to make use of that. Space travel will never be useful enough to pull that off. A self sustaining colony on mars is just barely possible (but I'm not sure if it is worth it), no place else in space will ever be colonized. The laws of physics are too harsh - only a "generation" ship could even leave our solar system (well you could put a child on something to leave and come back in old age without generations, but this would be pointless and unethical), and we have no reason to think those would last long enough to make the nearest star, much less one with habitable planets (which we might need to terraform).
The moon lacks too much to be self sustainable. Mars is a stretch: it is likely someone will reply that mars isn't possible and they will have good points, so while I have concluded it is just possible I can see the points of those who think it is not.
But if we are to go more interesting places... shouldn't we have down breathing, eating, and sleeping on the moon so well that it isn't much of a cost or a risk? It's inherently a good testing ground for things we need to do reliably much further later.
Imagine if we never built ISS because putting a space station in Earth's orbit was a solved problem...
I'm too tall and I don't have twenty PhDs so I don't think "astronaut" is really on the table for me, but I would absolutely go to the moon if I had the opportunity.
The dust would give me some anxiety too but I think it would be worth it.
Robotics is unfortunately not there yet, unless we plan to send everything there fully assembled with zero maintenance ever. Unless you mean purely for basic exploration.
Tell that to the people of deadliest catch and dirty jobs: we have robots now that can do everything we want to without needing to sleep or eat! Sadly, we're not using them because they don't exist yet...
As a factorio player, once they added remote operation of robots to the game, I never travel back to a planet after I've got it set up. If they made it so I could land a robot, I'd never go in the first place.
