After much thought I'm beginning to come around to the idea that the United States government should not spend billions going in to space, even with the honorable goal of reaching Mars. Instead they ought to remove restrictions against private entities going in to space. Allow the free market to lead the way. Soon enough you'd have some robots mining material on some asteroid somewhere and using that material to create ships to go to Mars. Who knows how it would work, I just think that letting the market decide will work out much better in the long run than letting a bloated bureacracy like NASA be in charge. NASA seems to have a tendency to enjoy the status quo in which their funding keeps going up to support their pet projects, but little real progress toward colonizing space ever gets done.