memo to policy makers at NASA re space exploration

Stop building telescopes which only show what your photo shop computer software tells them to show.
Instead, build space shuttles which excite all of us and make great things dreamable and possible.
Stop launching billion dollar probes to pointlessly crash into Mars. These probes like your silly orbital telescopes are an attempt to distract people from the fact that you haven't been building space shuttles.
Stop splurging billions of dollars on developing a manned mission to Mars before we've even begun to develop the technology and practices necessary to colonise another planet.
Instead, build an international settlement on earth's moon (involving Russia, China, Europe, the USA, and Africa) and what we learn building and running Moonbase will tell us whether a Mars trip may someday be feasible or desirable.
Through Moonbase we may actually develop the technology to terraform a planet, ie how to make it habitable for humans.
We will also learn far more genuine scientific stuff than you are at present pretending to learn through your photoshop telescopes.
We will also learn about ourselves.
Moonbase will be a useful end in itself, not just as our first colonisation of another solar system body, but as a human endeavour, as an adventure, and as an act of the imagination made real.
It might also make the trip to Mars survivable when it eventually does happen.