In article ,
says...

if we cut the travel time to mars by 90%, the consuables are now 90% less.

Except we really don't know how to do that within our budget. Liquid
fueled LOX/methane engines will be far cheaper to develop.

since we dont have the $$ for hhumans to go to mars right now. were better off building vasmir, design a mars orbital station, design a mars lander station, basically design the infrastructure we will need.

Except what are you going to use to power those VASMIR engines? Again,
they require huge amounts of electricity in order to scale up to the
thrust levels needed for a manned mission. VASMIR engines are no magic
bullet, despite the salesmanship of the researchers who want more money
to work on their engines that they know really aren't all that suitable
for a manned mission.

I believe attempting to stop terrorism will kill any humans explore mars programs for the forseable future.

Just because you can't focus on more than one task at a time doesn't
mean that the US, as a country, can't.

however we could send the parts for a mars base buried under mars regolith by unmanned dozers, etc etc, while vasmir is tested.

Which would mean you would already have a conventional propulsion system
which works, and you're just waiting on sending people so it will be
"safe". This is a chicken **** approach to manned space travel which
****es on the history of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and even the Space
Shuttle. None of those were ever anywhere close to "safe", yet we flew
them anyway.

The astronauts know the risks and take them because they also know the
benefits. Not everyone is as scared as you.

since having quick travel within our solar system can open not just mars to exploration

And Star Trek's warp drive would open up travel to other solar systems.
Engineers don't build manned spacecraft on wishes.

and running a vasmir full out, could it get us to another solar
system?

VASMIR can't even get people to Mars. Why not wish for warp drive
instead?

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer