Heh.
me giving a sober assessment.
It's not about the will to do it (although that does play a role). The minute the copycyt Chinese land on the Moon the US -- possibly together with Russia &/or the EU -- will put an Apollo-type effort into getting to Mars. Hell, Just read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars (ISBN 978-1-85168-780-0) and see what nearly insurmountable problems there were in getting to the Moon, and she really only deals with life sciences, not physics.
The problem is that we can't realistically get a payload of sufficient size there. The technological hurdles are easy; the problems are physics and biology. We can build a dozen rockets, take advantage of orbital mechanics for unmanned segments, launch 'em off three full-size gantries together so that one launch window serves three machines.
But before we even think about getting the people there we still have to figure out how to arrive, orbit, and then land precisely -- repeatedly -- unmanned, all while dealing with the 8-minute radio delay in the best of circumstances.
The problem of human physiology is even worse than the physics problem. We can come up with odd trajectories and multiple burns and en-route dockings to provide additional fuel to carry such things out. Have you ever seen the astronauts coming back from 3-6 months on the ISS? It takes a huge fucking crew to get them out of the return vehicle and into recovery. It takes three strong men just to pull those poor bastards off the couch and out of the capsule. And that's from LEO. There ain't no recovery crews waiting on Mars.
