Here’s an idea to get more funding for NASA: destroy Mars before the China gets there first. What an epic feat of human ingenuity!
If you think about it, the proposal makes perfect sense. Build a vast militarized space agency network throughout the US; get the government to heavily invest in R&D; task scientists with a decade-long Mars Manhattan Project to come up with a plan of how to dissect the Red Planet gram-by-gram and then build the most awesome weapon the worl– the Universe has ever seen! Forget the playful Death Star, this thing will eat planets for breakfast!
I’m thinking either a massive laser or a huge burrowing fusion bomb… or trillions of regolith-munching nanobots. (I like the idea of nanobots.) Once this planet killer is built, it will be sent to Mars by 2020. This time, the deadline will be met, if NASA has infinite funds available for this audacious plan, they will build the Mars Marauder in a decade. This is how it works; flood the project with stupid amounts of cash and we will succeed. NASA will stimulate an entire industry, the US will be industrialized once more! Everyone will have a job, private contractors will be in a frenzy and Elon Musk won’t be able to sign SpaceX-NASA contracts fast enough!
Best of all, that worrisome Chinese space agency will give up their plans for space domination, we can relish in the joy that we’d won Space Race 2.0 before it even started! Why the hell haven’t we thought of this before?!
*STOP*
It’s OK, I haven’t gone all megalomaniac on you, I was just inspired by a comic on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The premise is that NASA science proposals bore congressmen. However, throw in a bit of pizazz and they start to listen, hence my mini rampage just now. Actually, reading the Mars Marauder proposal, it kinda makes sense. Just swap out the planet-killing bit, and we’ll have a means to actually land scientists on Mars… the reason behind this excellent comic:
Inspiration: Bad Astronomy
astroengine.com 
Hi astroengine, you got the rite information, we need to be the first to destroy the mars before China, as we are the who always stood the firsts……
Not too bad an idea- except the destroying Mars part. Let's mull this over instead. Instead of destroying Mars, we put the nukes or whatever ahead of its orbit enough to slow down its orbit to make it drop it's orbit enough just before the Chineese commies get there. And repeat as necessary until we're on our way. Besides, that way it'll be closer to the Sun and warm up more, with the bonus of making terra-forming it easier/cheaper. I only hope we can get enough funds soon enough to get going to it before we have to play “'hey China, you only missed it be THAT much'” with Mars too many times that it winds up near Venus' or even Mercury's orbit. Talk about global warming!