"Well, considering the first question journalists ask when NASA organizes a press conference is always "How much is this flight (or experiment) costing?", NO wonder NASA gets tired of the lack of scientific and technical interests of so many of those "accredited" journalists."

And why isn't costs one of the most important factors regarding space?
If it only costs say 10k to go to the Moon, would you go? If not you, then do you think that perhaps others would think it would be worth this price?
The high costs of getting into space IS the road block.
The main "HOW" to get into space is "how to get there at lowest cost".
Why do we send satellites into orbit? Cause it is cheaper way of getting some desired result. We don't build and launch weather satellites because of some weird desire to have some fancy contraption in orbit- it's a cost effective means of getting weather information.
Why are we interested in the Moon and Mars? It's territory that there is at least some possiblity we could use it sometime in the future.
If cost NEVER comes down, we are never going to use space for much more than we are currently using it for.
Maybe if costs remain about the same, sometime in the distant future, we will sent crew to Mars. Then the tax payers are going to ask, "What did we get for spending the hundreds of billions of dollars?".
What is the best possible answer that NASA could give?
Is it going to talk about "spin-offs" and "international co-operation"?
If the cost of getting into space is not lowered, nothing could be so important about Mars (or the Moon) that's it worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
If NASA is not working towards lowering the costs of getting/and being in space then whatever it is doing has little value- and is boring.