Its interesting, but its not like they've discovered the tomb of Xenu the unbeatable, or a crashed martian spaceship or a city under the surface. while discovering signs of past water is interesting and important scientifically, to the average person wouldn't the response be "We kind of knew that from past discoveries, that there had been water on mars surface..
Its like they said on the Simpsons once, "where can I get some Tang around here"
As far as this propelling space exploration, I have my doubts that man will really push for more manned space exploration, and it will all continued to be done by probes. I doubt that the mission to Mars will happen in my lifetime, or a expedition to the deep space will happen while I'm still converting oxygen to carbon dioxide.
The fact is that anything beyond the International Space Station manned wise is too expensive and there are too few immediate benefits to it.
I mean, frankly I would prefer that all the nations of the World except for North Korea (
) pool all of their space program money together into one huge budget and start building a Star Destroyer sided Pulse Engine powered space ship crewed by an international crew to go to the edge of our solar system while planting Earth Flags where we can and exterminating all possible signs of life in the galaxy (Zap take that pre-biotic one celled organism under the surface of mars", blammo kill that frozen bacteria in the water on Iago.