It is going to take 100B to put men back on the moon and take over 10 years. For 1B you could have a FAST state of the art rover there in a couple of years that could be teleoperated to at a level almost equivalent to a man being there. They can't even reasonably calculate the cost of a mars trip, and frankly there are so many variables that it is currently deemed to be too unsafe a mission to even undertake.

Is a man going to stand there with an instrument in his hand against a rock overnight? That is the kind of duty these rovers are doing to figure out what's inside the rocks. Complaining about how slow mars rovers are when they were designed to last only 3months and travel 100M is so shockingly absurd I can't believe you broach it. Rovers can and have been designed to go much faster, but there are cost tradeoffs depending on the mission. When a rover is supposed to spend most of its time stationary examining things for long periods, it doesn't really gain that much to move tremendously faster especially if it is expected to move in only very short hops.

Then next generation Mars Science Laboratory Rover is much bigger and faster. The original thesis was about COST benefit. Right now NASA shuttles cost 1/2 billion just to put a man in LEO. If you had put the cost of the manned program for ISS (200 Billion) for unmanned exploration of the moon, we would already have many answers we hope to get by manned missions in 15 years in the future if ever.

I challenge you to justify your "man is faster argument" by cost benefit numbers. Manned space is currently slowing our exploration pace by over a factor of 2 by budget. I've also laid out my argument many times, that slowing exploration in effect slows true sustained human presence off planet. There are some questions that need answering before we can achieve any sustained presence off planet. We need to use the cheapest possible means to find the answers to those questions.

We should stop romanticizing these endeavors to the extent that we do stupid things. The horse was superior in travel to machines until it wasn't anymore. It is time to recognize the age of unmanned (teleoperated semiautonomous) instruments in space. Are you following the exponential penetration of UAV's for defense purposes?