Argument essay: The following opinion was provided in a letter to the editor of a national aeronautics magazine:

The following opinion was provided in a letter to the editor of a national aeronautics magazine:

“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."

Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.

The author of the given passage suggests that the National Aeronautics magazine should invest their resources in unmanned space flight rather than manned ones. The argument however does not completely hold strong on the grounds of the above claims. The author provides many such faults that show chance for doubt to the author's claim and hence the following reasons can be considered to bolster the fact that the argument is flawed and inconsistent. 

Firstly, the author mentions that the space flight that accomodate men or women are costly and dangerous. The author doesn't give any instance or examples to prove his point. How is the space flight carrying men be costly and expensive? Is it the additional expense that is given to the pilots or is it the cost of the high quality equipments used in the flight? On grounds of being dangerous, if the flight is a manned one, how does it show that it is dangerous? The problem can also lie in with the parts used in the flight or their might seem to be a problem with the machinary or mechanism during the build. In fact , if the flight is a manned one, their can be regular updates about the proceedings or faults in flight during the mission and the working can turn out to be more efficient. However the author provides no statistics or analogy to prove his point. 

Also the author feels that a larger and wider amount of information can be obtained from unmanned space probes than from manned ones. The author compares two probes that are not analogous to each other. Maybe a manned flight is differently built than an unmanned one. Maybe the cost of construction is more for the unmanned one as it substitutes all the requirements that a man could perform in a machine, which would surely require a more complicated and convoluted machinary as well as higher chances of failing. Likewise, a manned system will have different machinary and workings depending on the strength of the people travelling in it and human expertise required to update data and information. Therefore the grounds of comparison here, are flawed and not proven correctly.

Finally the author also feels that investing their resources in unmanned flights is more useful and maybe profitable for them. However the author fails to realize that the unmanned version of the space flight might require a higher amount of time, money, effort and human interference during its construction and would have to be fed with a set of pre fed instructions to gather information as per the requirement. Also the author should not forget the fact that a machine can never be 100% efficient and any failure can lead to a huge and massive debacle. Therefore the national aeronautics dept should give this consideration another thought.

Hence in conclusion, we can say that the above argument gives the above points for it to be considered as flawed and hence cannot be averred to. If the author kept the above points in mnd during his analysis of the manned and unmanned space probe, then he could have proven his point in a better and stronger way with valid points and justification.