Aside from their effect on the few Mars nuts who hang out here, most of whom appear mentally disfunctional in the extreme, what the new Mars images are doing is increasing the demand for more robotic exploration of Mars, and ending demand for manned flights there.

That said, you left out the most important point in doing this calculus - keeping the manned space infra-structure in place until such time as it is both cheap enough and safe enough to go to Mars -

The way, and the only way, to do that is by implementing some form Langley's Mazanek's teams' Moon based system for defending the planet against asteroid and comet impact -

Further, and note this well, the general public still likes the space station, despite all its faults. That is because they like the idea of mankind, in other words people from different nations, working together peacefully in space.

Thus one can also safely assert that Mazanek's architecture is going to have to be modified to realize both the support and cost savings available from international co-operation. See

http://www.geocities.com/epgrondine

for one such architecture.

ep

structure that