[dogscoff]

Right now we are about as far from getting a man to Mars as we were from getting a man to the Moon when Kennedy committed the States to it. In other words, we could have the technological capability to get a person there and back again within a couple of decades if we decided to do it.

...

I dare claim that we have the technology to do it now.

I read a book a while agao by Arthur C Clarke. Can't remember what it was called, but it was looking at the possibility of going to Mars and terraforming it etc etc.

Anyway, in this book, there was mention of a project conceived just after the 2nd W War by one of the nazi rocket scientists. He had laid out plans and costs for a trip to Mars using 1940s or 1950s technology! He would have lifted a hideous amount of hardware into space using bigass rockets, then used more bigass rockets to send a fleet of 12 ships to Mars.

He described the costs of things by comparing them to military campaigns, and decided that a trip to Mars could have been done for the same price as a "small war".

Now this guy clearly wasn't quite screwed on tight enough, and hardly anything was known at that point about the effects of zero-G and survival in space so the mission might well have failed for those reasons, but I imagine his maths would have been sound as regards moving the necessary amount of mass the required distance.
With what we know now there's no doubt we could get ppl to Mars if someone was just willing to cough up the cash.

Maybe if we could persuade certain world leaders to refrain from starting small wars, the human race could actually do something useful.

Not sure where I'm going with all this, but it was an interesting book...