Drones "are under consideration, " the defense officials said, though the military's stash of unmanned aerial vehicles is in heavy demand.

CNN: January 16, 2013 -- Updated 1835 GMT (0235 HKT)

Drones "are under consideration, " according to defense officials, though the military's stash of unmanned aerial vehicles are in heavy demand.

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Unmanned missions will precede that, though -- indeed, a new Moon probe is set to be the first launch from the aforementioned Vostochny Cosmodrome.

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The performance of those six auto-bots marks a new height in humanless feats: Though Stanford's autonomous Touareg "Stanley" won a 132-mile unmanned sprint across the Mojave Desert in 2005, that event's bots merely had to stay on the road.

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