Why not a Mars mission?

[sawyl]

Paul McAuley makes a good point about Obama and Brown and their bailout money: it's enough to pay for a handful of manned missions to Mars.

But let's get those costs into perspective. President Obama has estimated that taxpayers will have to pay in the region of 2.3 trillion dollars to bail out the American banking system... Even so, that's enough to fully fund five manned missions to Mars, assuming each costs around 450 billion dollars, the high end of estimated costs. Likewise, the cost of bailing out just two UK banks could fund three missions. Seems like a bargain to me.

Does anyone know if Kim Stanley Robinson and Stephen Baxter are available to design a new set of stimulus packages?