Reminder that the budget for NASA is about $20 billion and the current London Olympics cost $15 billion. And this latest Mars rover cost about 20% of what the London Olympics. Try to get your Moon and Mars bases with a shoestring budget. What NASA has done with their meager budget is impressive. Why not cut some of that inflated defense budget and invest it in NASA, but since there are no brown people to bomb on the Moon or Mars it's not a priority.
And if you think it's not "sexy" to find out if Mars has ever been hospitable to life in the distant past, then I don't know what to say. If it shows that it was hospitable to life at some point, better yet if it finds traces of microbial life then the odds that there is life out there sky rockets insanely. The odds that life has popped up in two places at least in the same system has huge implications.
Science doesn't cater to the whims of the ill-informed masses, it's slow paced and sometimes we need to crawl before we can walk, let alone run. Sending humans on to Mars is a huge hurdle, it's not a couple of days journey as it's with the moon, it would take months and brings a slew of problems that need to be sorted out. I hope I will be around when we finally get some people on the Red Planet, but considering how the priorities are screwed I don't feel optimistic. More money and effort has been used to figure out on how to destroy rather then to create and improve life on Earth.
It's too bad that it all has to be about jetpacks and flying cars before the masses get excited by science, instead of the sheer curiosity and journey it takes to figure out things, no matter how small it seems.
