"Getting back to Geoff post. I don't believe fueling in space is better or cheaper than just launching with enough in the first place. The infrastructure that must be built to make fuel anywhere in space cost would cost hundreds of billion of dollars over hundreds of millions for launching fuel. It make no sense."

Well, you can't begrudging the 5 million prize.

The thing is if you are imagining a future of NASA only space program- and all that entails: which essentially something that has limited funding of the range of 20 billion per year until we are all dead and buried. Then your costs of "hundreds of billions" is reasonable- if not a bit low:).

But if you looking at the space environment as someplace which is in someway viable- which might mean to Chris Vancil, Mars being place that human colonies are studying and working in this environmnent- starting with dozens of people growing into hundreds and then thousands of people. And you want this to start to occur say in next 30 years or less. Then the NASA only space program simply won't "work". Even a flag and footprint type manned mars mission is pretty dubious.
The future I'm looking at is very different than this. I want future where trillions of dollars are spend on the infrastructure to make fuel in space- an condition evenually similar to what current oil producers are spending yearly in order sell oil to the world market. I evenually want rocket fuel cheaper in space than on Earth. Now to get that cheap will take decades- but getting cheap energy and getting cheap water is possible in the space environmnent. It's only hard to do because of cost of getting off this planet Earth. NASA could never ever do this, but markets and private sector can do this- as they have always done this in the past.
All this needs is to start small (costing few billion and making enough profit to expand operations and have a ever increasing market). As far as govermental costs in terms of getting the private sector started, the costs are rather minor [it could be less than 1 billion dollars]. But I'm not including the cost of exploration to find minable water on the Moon.