From his dairies, I get the impression that DarkSyde and I are roughly of an age. Like him, I had the requisite Estes D-based model rockets. I had the hand assembled, scale-model Saturn V; Saturn I-B; Excursion module; reentry module model -- and, as a disabled child for whom such constructions were particularly hard, mine was a labor of unimaginable love.
So, when I read this diary, in which he claims:
1) Super heavy boosters like Ares V can launch a lot more than manned missions. Imagine a 10 to 14 meter space telescope millions of miles away from earth's glare (20 to 30 times better resolution than Hubble) able to resolve everything from exosolar planets to hypothetical, large scale ET construction projects; 2) Humans can do things machines can’t do; 3) Necessity is the mother of invention – the spinoffs from past manned space projects include everything from the device you are reading this on, to materials and designs found throughout your neighborhood and workplace.
I feel for him. Because I want to believe, just like he wants to believe.
But I know better.
Point one if refuted by asking whether we have ever used Sat-V for heavy lift outside of Apollo and Spacelab -- that is, outside of the manned program. Dude, you know the answer; it's "of course not". Ares V has no use beyond the heavy lift of all of the extra, excess, useless life support equipment the people -- those fragile, inconvenient humans that are a core part of manned flight -- require.
When and if we ever launch a large aperture space telescope at one of the Lagrange points, we'll do it with many small launches, not with one big launch, and we'll move the individual pieces into place with high specific impulse, low thrust engines -- an option which is only possible because no persons will be involved.
That's good engineering; we'll get the pieces into place with minimal risk for each individual piece, while minimizing the cost of recovery from a failure. It's also a direct refutation of (3) -- by asking "what can I do with what I already have", I came up with a far better solution to the real problem, not to mention a solution which doesn't require pie-in-the-sky boosters.
As to (2), notice that a human crew can not do what I listed here -- boost slowly into a final position. During the time it takes to get to final position, a human crew would need to breathe, eat, and drink. Otherwise, they do the one thing which humans can do, but which machines can not: die. Machines may fail, but they do not die, and that difference is everything.