I guess these are nations that have something to prove in this area, especially China and India. Putting a man on Mars will certainly confirm you to the general world population as a "real" new dominant power.

Or confirm you as a nation that puts an expensive, small return mission as priority over more pressing internal problems?

As long as we continue to be human we will always have 'internal' problems.

The big picture is that Earth is a single point of failure and the clock is ticking away.

Mars should be a higher priority but I don't expect the government to solve it. They've grown too big and dumb for that it seems.

This hopefully will be tackled by more visionaries like Buzz Aldrin, Elon Musk, and Burt Rutan...

Internal problems always will be. By this logic we should cancel almost all pure research projects.

From a UN Report: "More than 700 million Indians, or roughly two-thirds of the population, do not have adequate sanitation. Largely for lack of clean water, 2.1 million children under the age of 5 die each year"

My point is: shouldn't a country like India put their research and money toward solving THESE problems instead of putting a man on Mars?

How do you figure?

If anything space exploration is research intensive. We have done a lot of research in space and even on the ground before we got there.

I'm curious as to what you mean by pure research.

I don't understand your comment. You're saying that certain research should take priority over solving internal problems, but space exploration shouldn't...? Why?

Humans in space efforts have nothing to do with research. They are now purely national prestige efforts. And I am extremely pro-space, I just don't think current efforts are doing ANYTHING AT ALL about getting us there permanently.

I'm saying that it should be more of a priority amongst the general public. I didn't say it should take priority over other forms of research. =)

Also, if you can generate rocket fuel with internal labour (not imported), you can outdo the Americans in rocket fuel cost by a maybe 10x factor (I mean India here, or any economy like Thailand, with a different 'gearing' from the US dollar).

I'm confused -- is labour cost a big part of rocket fuel costs?

Actually I'd like to know much more about rocket economics. How much of the cost is in fuel vs engines vs support staff etc? If we started cranking out Delta rockets at mass production rates could we get the price down to, say, a million bucks a pop?

Not sure about rockets specifically, but I do know that the only reason the Soyuz is way cheaper than the Space Shuttle is lower Russian wages.

I mean that materials are theoretically cheaper because of the low exchange rate, and so is labour.