Titan is good but I'd start out with Ceres.

"Current law is a bit hazy, but it seems to say that wealth belongs to humanity as a whole. Let’s go with that. "

Let's not. I think it's been made clear by the recently passed Space law that companies will own the resources they take off the asteroid, not the asteroid itself. But don't think the companies are going to be making all that profit without the government getting its cut. That's what government does best...take from those that produce. So the government will no doubt have large licensing fees for the prospecting, fees for launching, fees for berthing with living and work stations, refueling fees and of course taxes and more taxes for anything and everything they can think of. And that's not entirely a bad thing. With those fees and taxes, their will be the need to have X number of government employees in space to collect, inspect, enforce, etc. These employees will have their own needs (housing, food, water, healthcare, entertainment, etc) which will require X number of additional people to provide those needs and each of them will have similar needs, etc. It won't take long once the business case is made for going there.

To those that think the price tag is going to hold us back, think of this: Royal Dutch Shell PLC announced a few months ago that it was quitting it's Arctic drilling campaign after investing $7 Billion in exploring those areas for oil. BP was fined almost $19 Billion in fines for the Gulf of Mexico and wrote it off as an expense...easy to do when they found $1,5 TRILLION in deposits after spending about $15 Billion in deep water searches over the last two decades. In other words, telling a company that they'll need to spend $5 Billion to put a station on the Moon that will enable them to search for Helium 3, platinum, Titanium, etc. is by no means a problem. It's not only possible but is done on a regular basis. Make a good business case and the money will not be a problem at all.

To put it bluntly, NASA's still-sketchy plan to "someday" send a manned mission to Mars just plain stinks. They want to use a new big rocket that is like a modern Saturn V to launch a new bigger version of what is basically an Apollo-like capsule. They want to put a few astronauts inside a small transit vehicle and have them spend several months in those cramped conditions exposed to large amounts of radiation so we can say we put some humans on Mars. With limited resources once they reach Mars, NASA wants them to conduct some experiments, collect rock samples (again thinking like Apollo) and then come back home. Then what? I'll tell you what...much like the Apollo missions, it will create a sense of "OK, we've been there" and then nothing much else will happen. An accomplishment that leads to little if any long-term progress.

Like Mr Barnard above, I believe we have to go back to the moon and learn how to live and excel in that environment before we try to do the same on Mars. And the only way to do it is to forget trying to do so for national status like the Apollo Program. No, instead it has to be commercial ventures. Ventures which support mining resources from the Moon. Ventures which provide material and life necessity services for researchers on the Moon. Get the likes of Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Robert Bigelow and others like them involved and show them how it can be make profitable and permanent. Then we will have an ever-expanding base on the Moon and will have been developing the technologies and techniques we'll need for a successful and ongoing presence on Mars.

Everyone reading this article/posting comments has their own political viewpoints. That is unavoidable. If you are a follower of the Man-Made Global Warming religion, then you will be very against Senator Cruz's efforts to move NASA funding more towards a mission that gets us closer to establishing a human presence throughout the Solar System.