While I don't agree with the anti-mars thesis of the article, I do think the article is hitting on something important: Robotic exploration is underrated.

Curiosity cost something like 2 billion to build and launch, but there's no reason building a car-sized rover has to be that expensive. With economies of scale + better design-for-manufacturing + reusable rockets the total cost would easily drop by several orders of magnitude. Why isn't NASA building factories upon factories that produce robotic probes?