Anything that requires a versatile response or independent judgment.

Could you provide a couple specific examples of tasks which fit the bill, that can't be accomplished effectively by unmanned missions?

Is there really nothing you can't imagine humans doing better than machines? Seriously?

Could you perhaps identify a single important task that we'd want to do in space that can't effectively be done by machines?

> Could you perhaps identify a single important task that we'd want to do in space that can't effectively be done by machines?

I certainly can -- appeal to voters. If space programs didn't have to appeal to voters to get funded, we could do away with manned programs entirely, and good riddance. It's said that an equivalent unmanned program costs just 10% of a manned one.

-- former NASA engineer.

Learn how humans react to space and how to build working environments to people in space.

Yes, and so could you if you weren't more interested in arguing.

Sure, for missions that aren't performed within a light-second of Earth. So far we have sent a total of zero humans far enough away to take advantage of their superior reasoning capabilities.

That's a very generous threshold for usefulness. For difficult interactive tasks—like, perhaps, performing fiddly repair work on a $2.5bn+ satellite—there is clearly some advantage to not having a ping of 2000 or even 350.

The human mind has a pretty awful ping time, and there's no reason not to take things slow in microgravity.

> The human mind has a pretty awful ping time

But unless the repair is going to be conducted by an AI—highly unlikely in the foreseeable future—then this is moot, as there will be a human brain in the loop in either case.

It's not moot. A high fixed latency from involving humans makes it far less useful to reduce the control latency by a quarter of a second.