Depends on what the goal is. If your Mars colony is just a PR^H^H national pride game - you've got a handful of people, some high-school kids' plant experimen

Depends on what the goal is. If your Mars colony is just a PR^H^H national pride game - you've got a handful of people, some high-school kids' plant experiment and the Little Box with the Antenna some TLA agency asked you to leave behind - then sure, it would be no more expensive than the SDI, the Libyan war or any other stupid boondoggle we can apparently afford. If you want an actual self-sufficient colony, you've got a much bigger project. I don't think we know what is actually required to create a self-sustaining technical culture in space, because we've only really done it by accident and not in space. But this: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insuffic... is as decent a hand-wavey starting point as any. And it is quite a bit more resource-intensive than a few kilopeople/few percent of organized human output.