While manned exploration of the moon and Mars certainly stirs the soul, fires the imagination and lifts the spirit, the cost of such a mission may be prohibitively expensive, approaching $1trillion, which could buy health care for the entire nation for almost a year.
The cost may be mitigated if this is to be a truly international effort as with the space station.
What are the practical benefits, however, of revisiting the moon again and going on to Mars?
This falls in the region of extremely expensive basic research where the benefits are unknown and perhaps non-existent.
There are many problems on Earth that need addressing, including global warming and the soaring costs of health care, college education and fighting disease, without shooting hundreds of billions of dollars into outer space under the supervision and management of the very irregularly performing NASA.
