To The Moon - Not Mars...

A couple of astronauts and some others are offering very knowledgeable arguments for returning to the Moon to "get our act together again" before attempting a manned mission to Mars. This seems very sensible to me.

I'd even go further, and say "Leave Mars to the Robots which are already doing such a fine job of it." If the information about Mars contained in a 1980 edition of The Larousse Guide to Astronomy is correct, and there's no reason to think it isn't, then Mars was virtually destroyed in a collision with a large meteoroid which punctured its crust back about 3.5 billion years ago. 

At that same point in time, life as we know it had not yet emerged from the primordial soup here on Earth, so it's not likely that conditions on early Mars would have been much different at the time it got hit by that meteoroid. From recent surveillance with spacecraft and rovers on the surface, we already know how barren and inhospitable it is there, and how difficult it would be to establish any kind of livable base. The expense of landing one pound of cargo on it is over a million dollars, and it seems pointless to risk human lives on such a venture when our robotic technology can provide us with the same information at less cost and less risk.