The public does not want to waste its money sending men to Mars, and no convention will change that
I guess this as good a place as any to mention this -
Mars is not Earth-like, it is Mars-like, dammit.
In 1964, before Mariner IV, there were no less than 3 serious engineering teams working on manned Mars flight using the Saturn 1 and Saturn 5 rockets, which were then in production.
After the Mariner IV images of Mars came back in 1964, that illusion ended, at least for anyone with any sense - even Webb would not speak up in favor of manned flight to Mars when pressed by Weisner - and it was Johnson who really stopped it -
What the public would like NASA to spend their money on is finding the next asteroid or comet to hit the Earth well before the time it hits -
ep