>I too tend toward the island-hopping approach to Mars colonization. Mars is such a sexy objective; it plays into the whole pioneer mythos that both your nation and mine share, making it an easy sale on an emotional level.

If sex appeal was the only parameter, we should should all fly missions to Kobe Tai (or Julian, if your inclination is different)....

Look: whenever Rob Zubrin started talking about the pioneer spirit here, the chuckles in the audience were deafening to everyone except him; & knowing the extent to which true belief can deafen people to opposing opinions, i doubt that the real USAmerican response to this ideal is that much different than it is here. Anyway: a manned Mars mission - >any< manned space mission - is a vibrant symbol of the absolute antithesis of a pioneering spirit: it's a bloated, bureaucratic enterprise that a few people will gain considerable symbolic pleasure from & the majority of taxpayers - you remember them? they're the ones actually stumping for all this - will get little or nothing from... & the taxpayers know this. What did the African-Americans get from whitey being on the Moon; & how would a manned mission anywhere really play in Peoria?

Am i advocating abandoning all manned space approaches? Of course not; but i am saying that we have to stop talking less about ultimate, sexy goals & more about what can done relatively cheaply here & now with technology which is essentially off the peg. I've always believed in flexibility & adaptability over big, dumbly heoic statements on making a sustainable space future - to the point taht some here would remember that i was a supporter of the Moon (& at times a strong critic of the NEO alternative) as the next manned space until i was convinced by the technology & orbital numbers that NEOs were a better, cheaper alternative. There are opportunities: outside the US, there's a lot of interest in developing a human space flight capacity beyond Earth orbit if it isn't in the ISS calss of indulgence (Russia probably has the technology but not the money; ESA has just began contracting for new technologies to achieve this goal; & Japan, PRChina & India are at different levels on the road to & beyond LEO)... in this political environment, the possibility of cutting a cheap manned space deal late in this or early in the next decade seems realistic; but if advocates in the US insist on going for the whole Martian caboose or nothing at all, the odds are nothing will happen at all is exactly what we'll get.

The difference between Europe's share in a US$10b mission to an NEO & it's share in a US$80b Mars mission is massive; & (especially in a political context where NASA's inability to deliver the ISS demanded by its international partners has wasted an awful lot of space science money), this difference will almost certainly be enough to prevent the deal being cut at all.

Robert