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The cost to send an umanned probe somewhere is less than 1% of what it would cost to send a human. We didn't learn anything by sending people to the moon that we couldn't have found out with robots. Sure, I understand it was a PR thing, but any interest it generated in space exploration quickly dwindled. If the money spent on the Apollo program was instead spent on unmanned probes and maybe a permanent space station in near Earth orbit, we would know so much more about our neighborhood in space.
About the only time I could possibly justify sending a human somewhere is if we found some indication that there was something of interest that could not be investigated by machines - for instance, if we discovered conclusive evidence there was life on Mars. THEN send some astronauts over.
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