Pessimism has little to do with the actions of politicians.

If Senators and Congressmen believe that a $5B mission to study lunar cheese via sub-orbital flight would drive that money into their constituents' areas, they'll support it.

It has nothing to do with what the public at large thinks about NASA; it's merely a bullet point they can trot out at the next election: see, through my work in Congress I brought jobs to your area, re-elect me.

And THAT is why I doubt NASA can pull this off, because it's clowns like that who control the purse-strings. It's why we junked Apollo capsules for the Shuttle. It's why we have an Orion capsule in development now to replace the Shuttle. It's why the target for HSF went from the Moon to low Earth orbit, languished there for decades, paused briefly on the absurd notion of an asteroid interception mission as being viable, and is now back at Mars.

My pessimism in NASA's manned program is well-founded.

They have the ideas and the know-how, but their plans are at the mercy of self-serving, science-ignorant politicians.

At this point we have corporations that can fund space flight. Do we really need governments funding a trip to mars? I think it isn't worth it. Leave it up to those who want to spend their own money. The government should be funding climate science, geo-engineering research, studying how to avoid war, and continuing to fund research into more powerful and cost effective propulsion and energy systems that we can use in space and here on earth.

I think NASA shouldn't send a manned mission to mars.

> "studying how to avoid war" I'm sure it isn't that straightforward....

Say you diverted NASAs 18.4 billion yearly budget. What can you do with 18.4 billion dollars? To give you contrast of how little that is relative to other American financial concerns, the GM bailout of 2008 was 51 billion.

Why not have Mars missions if the US can give car companies tens of billions?