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People should decide 'are you willing to spend all this money to go to Mars?' I think the average person on the ground would never spend that amount of money - they have to spend it on something that makes sense and this is definitely saving our planet.

We want to make sure we get living astronauts to the surface of Mars.

If NASA is to reach beyond the Moon and someday reach Mars, it must be relieved of the burden of launching people and cargo to low earth orbit. To do that, we must invest more in commercial spaceflight.

The purpose of going to Mars is for humans to first begin to occupy, permanently, another planet in the solar system. The astronauts or pilgrims, whatever you might call them, are going to be very historically unique human beings.

Exploring Mars is a far different venture from Apollo expeditions to the moon; it necessitates leaving our home planet on lengthy missions with a constrained return capability.

Let's not spend resources that we don't need to be sending astronauts back to the moon. Let's not spend expensive resources on bringing people who have reached Mars back again. Prepare them to become a growing colony.

It's great that people are interested in Mars.

My view is that we should go back to the moon, build up the infrastructure to make flights there commonplace - be comfortable with it - then use that infrastructure to expand and go to Mars.

The way I see it, commercial interests should manage a lunar base while NASA gets on with the really important task of flying to Mars.

I would suspect strongly that over a period of time, if we put our mind to going to Mars, it will be a consortium of several countries.