The only achievement I can come up with that hasn't been done with unmanned probes is a serious sample return mission. The Apollo mission brought back 382 kg of lunar material. Unmanned Soviet missions have brought back a total of 0.32 kg. Would we back then have been capable of building an unmanned system capable of investigating rocks, cleaving samples, and bringing back hundreds of kilograms? Are we now?
good example. but you are comparing the soviet space program to the US space program. You seem to have good data on the yield of moon rocks; do you have any data on cost per kg? It would be interesting to see!
And even if it did make sense historically, with as far as robotics have come in 2017 I can't see a reason why we would do a similar manned mission in the future.
It's hard to find data on the individual cost of Soviet space programs. Wikipedia gives the total cost for the Luna program at 4.5 billion dollars, but that figure is unsourced, and it's unclear whether they're 1969 or 2008 dollars.
In any case, the Apollo program easily wins in kg/dollar. The total cost of the Apollo program was just 22 billion 1969 dollars, so a bit more than 60 million 1969 dollars per kilo and obviously the program did much, much more than just return some rocks. On the other hand, just launching the Proton-K rocket that got the Luna 16 to the moon cost 100 million 1969 dollars, so up to 1 billion dollars per kilo. And that's not counting the development cost of the vehicle etc...
Good news for the future though, China is planning to send a sample-return mission in November[0] and they plan to return at least 2 kilograms. If they succeed, I guess you don't need humans for that either
