Curiosity Martian Hunting

On Monday morning, at approximately 6am GMT, the latest NASA mission will attempt to land a space rover in the Gale Crater on Mars after an eight and a half month journey travelling a distance of 354 million miles.
Using a giant heat shield, the world’s biggest parachute, eight rocket thrusters and a bunch of nylon cables, scientists hope Curiosity will not only survive the 13,000 mph entry but provide an answer once and for all to the question whether life exists, or ever existed, on the fourth planet from the Sun.
Brimming with sophisticated machinery, the rovers mission is to seek out any signs of organic material on Mars or evidence that the Planet once supported any form of life and will help pave the way for the humans who might one day follow.
'Putting men on Mars is not unachievable. It is just really hard and expensive' explained a NASA spokesman and as half of the previous Mars missions have ended in failure, i would add dangerous also but i find the whole space exploration programme since 1969 so disappointing.
We should have moon bases by now and we should be further down the road to a manned mission to Mars than we presently are considering the first time we landed a Rover on Mars was in 1971 and 4 decades on we are still at the same stage.
Frustratingly slow progress but there is a certain irony that our future generations feared Martians visiting the earth with superior technology and abducting us for experiments but we are the aliens with the superior technology who will be landing there and if we find life, abducting the local population for testing. I dare say if a valuable commodity was found on other planets, we wouldn't be averse to oppressing the local inhabitants and stealing it either just as we feared in countless sci-fi films.
That's a concern for future generations, my generation is hopefully the start of a renewed interest in space exploration, especially if Curiosity finds something, although there are many who question the cost of exploring other planets when we are facing such dire straights on our own one and that is a valid question.
My answer is that the US defence budget is $850bn per year, the NASA budget is $17bn which is $3bn less than what the American Government spends on air conditioning units for its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. How's that for mixed up priorities when we spend fifty time more on killing each other than we do on finding possible new worlds to live on since we have trashed this one.