It kind of bums me out that in the 60's we decided to go to the moon and did it more or less from scratch in less than ten years. We have made so much progress since then and a manned Mars mission is still twenty years away. I understand fully that Mars is no easy feat, but if we put the resources into Mars that we did to the moon, we could easily do it in ten years.
What bums me out is that in the late 60s and early 70s, man went to the moon several times with a great success rate, and anyone at the time would have thought that by 2014 going to the moon would be a cakewalk. Yet we haven't returned since something like 1972. I get that there's only so much you can learn from going to the same place again, but with what we've learned from the ISS about long term living in space, you'd think some kind of moon colony would be the next logical step.
I am thrilled that going to Mars is the ultimate goal of the Orion project, but at the same time, it seems like it's just a crazy pipe dream at this point that keeps getting pushed back. It would be doable if the resources were there, but I don't think that's going to happen. They pushed a lot harder to get to the moon back in the 1960s. These days it's very slow going.
Think about it, anyone under the age of 40 or so has never even seen man land on the moon in their lifetime. I think it could be as big an event now for NASA as it was back then, especially with the technology of today, live streaming the whole thing over the internet. And getting to Mars is going to be absolutely huge.
Don't get me wrong, landing a rover on Mars is still a damn impressive feat, but it doesn't quite capture the imagination like seeing a living breathing person land on a different rock.