You know what I wouldn't mind seeing first? An unmanned base on the moon to work through the kinks of in-situ fabrication and resource extraction in an extraterrestrial environment. It wouldn't have to be too big and it could even be semi-tele-operated (given a lag time of seconds, rather than minutes or hours) by researchers and technicians on Earth.
If we're talking about sending people to Mars to live for long periods of time, and worrying about whether in doing so we're consigning them to miserable deaths, it seems like spending the money to work out the bugs in a non life-and-death situation might be a prudent idea. We've sent people to orbit the moon, we've landed people on the moon and robots on Mars, but we've never had people spending time on another world without relying entirely upon supplies they brought with them.
If we're talking about sending people to Mars to live for long periods of time, and worrying about whether in doing so we're consigning them to miserable deaths, it seems like spending the money to work out the bugs in a non life-and-death situation might be a prudent idea. We've sent people to orbit the moon, we've landed people on the moon and robots on Mars, but we've never had people spending time on another world without relying entirely upon supplies they brought with them.