Re:comparison is out of whack (Score 1)

I disagree. Here's why... we have about 35 years of experience in sending probes to Mars. That's the collective investment of multiple generations of minds, congressional budgets , and political capital. We have 20+ years of a shuttle program stuck in LEO "helping us build the knowledge to go to Mars". And we're going to have another 20+ years on an "international" space station, also stuck in LEO. Now we're building a 1960's-era capsule, and a new space launch system to put us back on track where we were in the early 1970's. All so that we can spend yet another 20-years floating around an Asteroid... a destination that we're going to contrive... for the sole purpose of "learning what we'll need when we get to Mars". When you actually do the comparison though... it's infinitely more experience to literally spend generations of human potential preparing to maybe, someday go to Mars - than to just commit to it. It would be far... far less experience to just go to Mar. To go now. To go with existing technology. You know, something along the lines of what Robert Zubrin purposed in the mid-1990's... the Mars Direct program.

Humans on Mars is the dream, and the future of mankind. Humans stuck in the Earth-Moon system is the nightmare reality that poor leadership with no vision have thrust upon us.