NASA has found that there's real water ice right at the surface of Mars. Nobody seems to be saying anything about the potential impact of such a discovery .. it's on MSM but just as an announcement followed by a smarmy remark like "Gee, Gwen, pretty soon you'll be able to buy it bottled at the grocery store! Hahahaha" right before a commercial break.
What this really means is that it's now possible for extended missions on Mars! Follow me over the jump for my reasoning ...
So .. everyone knows from high school how water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, right? You've also probably done (or observed) the experiment in a lab class where they pass electric current through a U-shaped glass tube full of water and generate hydrogen and oxygen gas.
Well here we are, on Mars, with what's likely to be a pretty large amount of water ice. And, by the way, there's no atmosphere so you can get lots of power from photovoltaic panels. Lots of power and lots of water can make lots of oxygen and hydrogen.
Hydrogen is fuel, you don't have to bring enough fuel for a year, you just need enough fuel to get there and a bit to keep you going before you get the electrolysis stuff running. Ditto for oxygen. So now you can pack all that empty space with some food and an environment of some sort with a greenhouse included.
All of a sudden we can have a dozen people on Mars for extended periods of time. They'll figure out how to do useful things with all that energy and material. We'll get better at getting around on the planet, and getting around in space.
Pretty soon the space station needs to be bigger, and we have taxis for ground to station, and ships that never land to go between here and mars, and another taxi on the other end. And the big ship is ferrying excess hydrogen and oxygen back to the earth-orbit station. And there's an asteroid belt not that further out with huge rocks of high-carbon steel ..
This stuff can all happen as fast as people decide to spend money on it. We already know how to build a Mars mission, we've been thinking about it since the 60's.
Let's get the heck off this planet!
Slight update: I in no way mean to imply that we should toss the one we live on .. the goals of exploration of other worlds and care for our own are not mutually exclusive ..