I've been to the Huntsville, Alabama facility on a few occasions working on some optical measurement stuff. I had little idea what the guys were saying and they simply assumed I knew or I wouldn't be in the room. In that, NASA is a lot like real life.
A Mars mission is now hitting the "Yahoo-news-o-sphere". It is the next "big goal". Never mind that we last went to the moon 40 years ago and never mind that you wonder why we never went back. Some think the moon thing is because we got a message to keep off from some ETs. There is actually a lot of talk about that on the web. So now we bypass that moon and go straight to Mars - that is the thinking.
I'd go if you could ever get me in to a hermetically sealed capsule. Claustrophobia you know.