What “space community?” There is no space community. There are about a hundred different shops competing for their slice of the pie. There is a completely misinformed public. There is our corporate creed of never ever doing anything without making obscene profit and and even better making money without producing anything (failed DOD projects).

And there is Norm Augustine who KNOWS space is not the easy money defense is. Why do space? We have our answer; we are not doing space.

wiki: “Lockheed Martin is one of the world’s largest defense contractors; in 2009, 74% of Lockheed Martin’s revenues came from military sales.[4] It received 7.1% of the funds paid out by the Pentagon.[5]
It received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history.”

Augustine is interviewed after 5 years to see where we stand.

I would add, it seems if we can not find minable water. Or something else which minable in space, then there is little sense in sending humans to Mars.

Or NASA should be finding new markets in space, just as the satellite for earth orbits were “discovered” and developed into a global 200 billion dollar market.
I think NASA should tentatively conclude that there is minable water on the Moon, but NASA should explore the Moon to determine if this is actually a sound conclusion.

Though NASA should first develop fuel depots- even if there was not minable water on the Moon, NASA should use depots, but developing a market for rocket fuel in space [depot is a step in this direction] is simply the best way to explore space beyond Earth. Plus it helping to enable commercial mining of lunar water, which could begin once the Moon has been explore enough to term whether this is possible and where on the Moon would be the potentially better areas to start mining water.

But NASA does not have to wait for water on the Moon to be mined, because with this knowledge it has built a road map for Mars exploration.

If water can be mined on the moon this will allow human settlements on Mars [and Mars is another potential market]. So at that point in time
it makes sense to explore Mars with the purpose of finding best ways in which one could have future human settlements on Mars.

It is as unknown that human settlement on Mars would actually be possible as it is currently unknown that there is minable water at poles of the Moon.
And there needs to far more work done to determine if Mars settlements
are feasible as compared to whether there is minable water on the Moon.

Or hoping that companies will invest in lunar water mining and fail, and/or hoping people will go to Mars and die- is not vaguely a good plan.

If there is not minable water on the Moon, NASA should find where else
there is minable water in space- before doing any Manned exploration
of Mars.

Also: Far be it from me, to give the asteroid-visiting enthusiasts any ideas———–since I most want to see NASA resume manned flights to the Moon, first————but, according to a few astronomy articles & Wikipedia, there has even been at least one confirmed case of where an ultra-small NEO has actually been captured into an Earth orbit, temporarily. The object, first designated as 2006RH120, and also known as 6R10DB9, is of the Apollo asteroid group. It is estimated to have a diameter of 4-6 meters, and was temporarily orbiting the Earth at a closest-approaching distance of 0.7 lunar distances, from September 2006 to June 2007.

It eventually departed for a solar orbit, but according to the Wikipedia article, it will make another near-Earth encounter in 2028. You would think that the NEO-chasers would be all over the idea of a human or robotic rendezvous with such a deep space object, since if it gets recaptured by Earth’s gravity, it may linger in an ephemeral orbit of close to a lunar-distanced one. But no, you really don’t hear about such a concept. I still adamantly favor NASA resuming with human Moon missions first, but if, once our new Lunar spacecrafts have proven themselves, some agency mission-planners would like to add a temporary-satellite or a quasi-satellite expedition to survey an asteroidal and/or meteor-sized body, alongside our primary spaceflight manifest, I suppose that I could get behind such a secondary venture, at such & such a point.

Not only do they display the decline of the US human space program, they also create an illusion to lawmakers that positive progress is being made.

The great problem I see is our hyperfixation on Mars.
I see it even among those who post on this blog.

Mars should not be the “ultimate goal”.
Such a vision causes us to lose focus on the near term objective.

Mars ought to be on piece in a larger tapestry of seeking wealth from space.
It is a means to an end, just as the Moon is.
Treating Mars as our “ultimate goal” means that once we go, we then are left wondering “Where do we go from here?”, just as we did after Apollo.

On the other hand, treating Mars as we may treat the Moon means that once we go there, we remain to develope it, rather than achieving a stunt in hopes of making it a second home for humanity (or as some want to do, making it the next setting of reality TV).

merriam-webster.com:
“pragmatic: dealing with the problems that exist in a specific situation in a reasonable and logical way instead of depending on ideas and theories.”

What is the specific situation and what are the problems that can be addressed?

A shorter answer would require less philosophy.