Building deep space, space bases powered by robots. Always seemed to make more sense to me, instead of just going straight to mars. We could use our moon and Mars's moons and maybe have satellite bases in between, that just drift and correct themselves to stay in the right orbit. It would be great for safety and supplies and, it could protect against things like the planet's storms and unexpected unwanted occurrences, that would be damning otherwise, if people didn't have the required things for travelers to survive when something went wrong. They have a safe place to stop and repair along the way to fix whatever their problems might be, and since its all AI powered robots at those places. They won't use the supplies like humans would. We could just have robots stock pile and create whatever we needed. so materials for repairs, gases, and medicine could all be available. Stuff like this from NASA really seems to make this seem even more possible.