NASA should avoid a straight shot to Mars, panel says

The US should take a series of baby steps into deep space before sending humans to Mars, a review panel said on Wednesday. But NASA's first forays beyond low-Earth orbit may be two decades off if the agency does not get a large infusion of cash.
A committee tasked by the White House to review NASA's plans for human spaceflight has been considering a 'Mars Direct' scenario that would eliminate the agency's plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 in favour of building vehicles for a Mars mission.
But the option was scrapped on Wednesday during the group's last meeting. "We think Mars Direct is a mission that we're really not prepared to take on technically or financially, and that it would not likely succeed," committee chair and former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine said.
Instead, the committee plans to incorporate Mars as the overarching goal of all of the options they will present to the White House and the new NASA administrator, Charles Bolden.
"We're not giving up on Mars," Augustine said. Instead, the team plans to present a range of "deep space" options that would build up the capability to reach the Red Planet by sending humans to a series of successively more challenging and distant destinations.