[T@T]

I say "we" because I would imagine our Canadian government(among others) would be asked for financial support.

Good artical on CNN on why this should happen soon.

America's human spaceflight program is now adrift. On July 8, the space shuttle is scheduled to make its final flight, and the Obama administration has no coherent plan for what to do next.
Instead, as matters stand, the United States will waste the next decade spending $100 billion to support an aimless constituency-driven human spaceflight effort that goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing.

As a result of a string of successful probes sent to the Red Planet over the past 15 years, we now know for certain that Mars was once a warm and wet planet, possessing not only ponds and streams, but oceans of water on its surface. It continued to have an active hydrosphere on the order of a billion years -- a span five times as long as the time it took for life to appear on Earth after there was liquid water here.

Thus, if the theory is correct that life is a natural phenomenon emerging from chemistry wherever there is liquid water, various minerals and a sufficient period of time, then life must have appeared on Mars.

Furthermore, we know that much of that water remains on that planet today as ice or frozen mud, with the soil of continent-sized regions of the planet assessed as being more than 60% water by weight. Not only that, scientists have discovered that Mars has liquid water, not on the surface, but underground, where geothermal heating has warmed it to create environments capable of providing a home for life on Mars today.

We have found places where water flowed out of the underground water table and down the slopes of craters within the past 10 years.

If we go to Mars and find fossils of past life on its surface, we will have good reason to believe that we are not alone in the universe.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/2...tml?&hpt=hp_c2

Personally I often wondered how the world would react if we found past life on another planet or moon.