A question people ask.

We really want to send somebody to Mars. Why?

The answer to the question is that it’s a long way away, it moves all the time (sometimes it’s a very long way away on the other side of the sun), it’s expensive, it’s very dangerous, it’s a dead planet, there’s nothing humans can do there that our less expensive rovers can’t do, we can’t breathe the air, we can’t grow anything there, there’s no legitimate scientific reason to go and last but not least nobody would fund it, especially Congress.