Would the expense of NASA's manned trips to other planets be justified by the information?

No. Think of it this way. Moore's law tells us that the number of devices on an IC doubles every 18 months or so - and has done more or less since they were invented. Now work out how many doublings like that there have been since the Apollo programme was designed in the mid-1960s. I make that roughly 50 years, or more than 30 doublings. Now work out what that means for chip density. I make it around 1 billion times what it was back then. In other words, today's computers and other electronic devices are unimaginable more capable than those of the Apollo days. Computers have become vastly more capable. The sort of computer power which was available, both in space and on the ground, to the Apollo astronauts you would today be embarrassed to wear on your wrist. Your car is more computerised than an Apollo LEM. Man hasn't changed (except in the respect that educational standards in most western countries have fallen)..

Even in those days, manned spaceflight was far more of a political stunt than scientific exploration. Today it is pure showmanship, and has nothing to do with science. We should divert resources from the manned to the unmanned programmes.

No - Given today’s global economic troubles, it would take a global partnership to be able to achieve manned missions to other planets within our solar system.

the USA is in huge time debt, dude.

let the chinese go to uranus.