#2 is out of their control. I'd speculate that at least part of the purpose of this announcement is to shame Congress into ensuring sufficient funding.
Shaming congress doesn't appear to be effective at the moment.
Bush Sr. talked about going to Mars with SEI. Bush Jr. talked about it after Columbia. Skylab (the space station in the 70s) was supposed to teach us about long duration spaceflight in order to go to Mars (and we've been parked in LEO ever since).
I want to believe... And I like Zubrin's plan to go to Mars. As it could work with an incrementalist approach, and thus is pragmatic (and sounds like what they are doing). But the problem is that there is a long time before the work on the incrementalist dream starts and landing on Mars. Who knows what will happen to funding in the mean time.
It doesn't, but what other choice do they have? If you only have one button to press, you might as well keep pressing it. Maybe it'll work one of these times.
In quoting Einstein's definition of stupidity, the analogy is to ineffectively chopping at a tree without managing to fell it, and then proceeding to ineffectively do the same to N other trees.
