"Some may say that human exploration of Mars is too ambitious a feat to select as our near-term goal, but that is the view of the faint of heart. From the technological point of view, we're ready.

Despite the greater distance to Mars, we are much better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were to launch humans to the Moon in 1961 when John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to achieve that goal—and we got there eight years later. Given the will, we could have our first teams on Mars within a decade."

I say that if NASA were to magically vanish and the govt had 15 billion to spend on this project then it might be possible to get to Mars in less than decade. The story of the IBM exectutive who knew it would take 9 months to ship an empty box [nevermind put a functioning computer in that box] was an accuate assessment. The solution was to make a team that was isolated from the bureaucracy of IBM.

So in this sense we are further from going to Mars now as compared to pre-apollo because we have a bureaucracy that eats about 15 billion a year, and rather be under the delusion that having an existing NASA is some huge advantage and that in addition makes up for the more daunting task of doing Manned Mars rather than Manned Moon.

Doing a Manned Mars is harder than doing a Manned Moon. This is an unescapable fact. As I've said before, it's about 10 times harder, meaning it would take 10 times the amount money to go to Mars as compared to going to the Moon. Time is the major reason for this, not delta-v. On paper if you make crew stay on the Moon for a year and compare this with crew staying on Mars for a year, the result is to close this apparent huge gap. But long stays on the lunar surface is not a requirement for the Moon and if Apollo had long stays on the Moon as it's requirement then Apollo would cost far more money.

I say the honest way to compare it is ignore NASA. Start from a clean sheet. Start from group which is independent from NASA. Now, how much would it cost for this group to send crew to the Moon? Or how much would it cost this group to send crew to Mars? For the moon I would say 5 billion in total cost would be easily enough. For Mars it depends upon how much risk and depends what crew would be sent there for. Because Mars takes so long to get to, there is a natural tendency to want have longer stays [to make it "worth it"], but if you instead focus on a flag and footprint- grab a few rocks and leave in a week or so it's possible that 5 billion could be enough- but this would have more risks, risks of loss of life and other forms of risks, than compared to Manned Moon.

Instead of having a group run by govt or a NGO type organization, if you had it a commerical enterpise this would allow a truer reflection of the all the total costs of the risks and actual costs. The risk of being sued, the cost of money, the risks of delays in the schedule, etc, etc. Also any of benefits from a project is also more accurately reflected. So in the real world where all costs are counted cent by cent, Moon vs Mars in the near terms would be what I mean by a 1- 10 ratio in costs. For instance a prize for of 1/2 billion dollars might get a crew on the Moon and prize for 5 billion might get a crew on Mars. Though such a prize approach might be a bad idea- and gets even worse the bigger the prize amount. But then again, other than political damage, and considering we currently have no plans to have crew on the Moon by 2010 and Mars 2020, there might be some advantage to offering this prize which would expire for the Moon on 2010 and on Mars by 2020. And since this is so unlikely why not open the prize to anyone or any govt. Screw journeys, races are better:)