Prompt: “Manned space flight is costly and dangerous. Moreover, the recent success of a series of unmanned space probes and satellites has demonstrated that a great deal of useful information can be gathered without the costs and risks associated with sending men and women into space. Therefore, we should invest our resources in unmanned space flight.”
Assignment: Discuss how well-reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion, be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.

------------------------------------------
The author has concluded that we should invest in unmanned space flights since it is less costly and risky compared to manned space flights. The evidence presented refers to the fact that most recent successes of unmanned space flights in gathering a lot of useful information and that manned space flights are costly and dangerous. However, the evidence presented is not sufficient to convince the reader that unmanned space flights are better than manned space flights and this makes the argument less convincing.

Firstly, the author has assumed that the information obtained by the unmanned space flights are the same as manned space flights. This might not be true in all instances. The manned space flights could be used for cases where the mission requires a human presence to gather the information. The decision to use manned or unmanned space flights cannot be generalized based on the above reason. However, the conclusion could have been strenghtened if more evidence is provided to qualify the information obtained from unmanned space flights versus the manned space flights.

Furthermore, the author has failed to provide any concrete evidence on the total number of unmanned space flights that were made in the past and how many of them succeeded. It might be that many unmanned space flights might have failed earlier and recently, due to luck, a spate of successes have been achieved. If the author had quantified the number of successes vs failures and provided statistical evidence that the improvements made in the technologies of unmanned space flights has led to lower cost space flights, the conclusion will be strenghtened.

In addition, there is lack of evidence comparing the actual cost of manned space missions and how dangerous it has proven to be in the past and whether there have been any improvements made in technology to address them.

Lastly, the author has not provided the failures or successes of the manned space flights in order to compare against the unmanned space flights. It might be that the manned space flights are more reliable in the data collection and hence more costly. If the evidence had contained the results of manned space missions and the results had been compared with the unmanned space flights , it would have helped to strengthen the conclusion.

In conclusion, it is clear from the above reasons, that the evidence provided is not sufficient to strengthen the conclusion that the unmanned space flights should see more investment in the future.