" NASA's working assumption until then had been that, hardcore space groupies apart, people would only feel an imaginative investment in space if astronauts were involved, acting as a kind of representative human presence and giving the onlookers somewhere to situate themselves in relation to what they were seeing. Astronauts warmed space up, in media terms. They made it consequential. They provided the marker of human intent without which (it was assumed) any location would be just a set of affectless co-ordinates out there in the vacuum. The unmanned science missions to the planets were for scientists only, not for the general public whose emotions swayed space budgets. But when Pathfinder bounced safely to rest in Ares Vallis, and the six-wheeled rover Sojourner trundled out onto the boulder-studded plain like a big, cute, self-propelling roller skay, NASA discovered it had a spontaneous hit on its hands. It turned out people were willing for a robot to act as their surrogate on another world, so long as they could feel intimately connected to what it was doing. "

― Francis Spufford , Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin