Answering DougJ below, yeah, I already wrote a couple of posts about how the manned Mars program is worse than pointless. It also starved other programs that NASA has picked up over the years with real human value like monitoring global warming. I know guys doing fantastic work with real human value who lost their funding four years ago because Bush’s Moon/Mars glory projects soaked it all up.
Look, there isn’t any Soviet Union threatening to put its boots on Mars first. The Chinese have a crash program to, uh, accomplish what we did in 1969. Frightening! Other than that everyone else’s space program is sensibly focused on robot exploration, satellite monitoring and keeping that affordable-but-still-expensive orbiting vanity habitat going.