Mars, no really; again

[spmetla]

The infrastructure put in place to support future manned missions to the Moon and Mars are what will be the stepping stones for private industry to step up exploration. The upfront costs are tremendous for what appears to be purely prestige milestones. If further exploration manned or otherwise will be done in the future it will require that infrastructure in the form of essentially orbital spaceports. If large vessels for mining or exploration or colonization are to ever be built in the future they'd have to be built in near Earth or Moon orbit using materials gathered from outside our planet as well.
If we ever have an orbital station that's available for 'public/commercial' use that will be the thing that actually leads to future colonization via larger space stations and even more distance in the future moon/mars bases.
For ventures this large and expensive however its unrealistic to expect private industry to be the leader, it's always required government assistance for grandiose ideas such as this. The Space X rockets doing resupply missions for the ISS as just a tiny example of it.

In the words of President Kennedy "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

I've always thought that the post-Vietnam lack of pride in the Space program that led to the cancellation of the Apollo missions, allowed Skylab to fall into the atmosphere and pinned all our hopes on the Space Shuttle was a setback that's almost unforgivable. The retirement of the space shuttle with no replacement is the epitome of our short sighted thinking. If it takes 'prestige' missions of such a massive scale to get the public behind NASA then so be it.
At the very least it'll encourage more kids to pursue science or engineer which has an incalculable payoff for our future only if we have a government and industries supporting and fostering that drive.