There is my point!
The robots that have landed on the Moon have done at least equal science to the Apollo missions , and were before and since the Apollo missions.
For the cost of the Apollo program we could have landed a much greater number of robots , and each robot could have stayed on the moon untill it ran down .
But the people of the nation and the people of the world would have hardly cared, you cannot aspire to be a lunar lander robot.
A lot of the bang we got for our Apollo buck was the prestiege, a lot was the vision.
That is still what we need , you have to be a real geek to love the Couriosity rover , so even though the Science is strong only a few of us are getting any bang for the Mars program buck at all.
The sooner we can get an handsome Man or winsome Woman on Mars the better , even if they are Chineese.