A reader points to remarks by Sir Martin Rees in which he advocates the pursuit of human spaceflight by private organizations rather than by governments: Adventurers to fund space travel, astronomer royal says - BBC News - July.27.10 .

He has been saying this for several years, e.g. see reports here and here. Not all UK scientists agree with him, though, on the lack of value of government human spaceflight as shown here and here.
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There are many sites of great scientific interest to explore on Mars but unfortunately NASA went with one big and expensive lumbering lab rather than several small but highly capable rovers that could be distributed across the Red Planet: Mars site may hold "buried life" - BBC - July.29.10. Yes, I'm well aware of limitations on the DSN and other resources but a billion or so of the overrun for MSL could have been spent instead for upgrades of those systems.