Mars is a place where normal winds are as bad as earth's hurricanes.

You know that is bull. We actually could see that normal winds are indeed  calm most of the year. We saw that  from the last two rovers and even before . Indeed there are violent and enduring storms far stronger than on earth but one can learn to cope.

Stormy,

Again, why the fuzz and buzz when NASA is actually back to 1975 and 1976 when they sent the Vikings to Mars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_2

My professor and friend Dr Vrebalovich worked on that project and even before he died some years ago he was expressing astonishment at the progress of NASA since his era. No, they are not going back. The Vehicle on Mars is the size of a car. The landing strategy for depositing such a massive robot on the surface is monumentally and tangentially different in strategy and tech.  They are going to drive that thing HUM-V style up a  6 kilometer mountain. It will spend 2 years there to complete its scheduled task then its batteries have another 14 years of shelf life to take on tasks not yet planned. This is far more than merely photographing and returning low rez pictures from 100 thousand Kilometers. This is hi rez close up analysis with dozens of tools.

What makes you think that China will not catch up or alternatively will not end up purchasing all these projects from the NASA directly.

It will  take decades to catch up with the experience and technology that ranges from moon/mars/ Titan landings, voyages to asteroids, landing on asteroids; voyages to comets, collecting comet material, probing comets and now landing on one in 2 years when Rosetta stone gets to comet Churyumov.

What is the price of the knowledge from these projects? The moons regolith can power the earth for a thousand years, the probe of comet Tempel 1 by deep impact space craft informs us it's inside is made up of peridot and rubies! They cannot buy what is being discovered.

look, as the USA decline economically while China rises it is more likely that China will end up buying the technology, the rocket factories, the projects and even the American engineers. I won't be surprise that in the near future the American and World astro-scientists decide to migrated to China in search for better jobs and salaries.

you are in a dream world. Only you want to go to china. There is not a line in that direction.

You are trapped in your white supreme view of the world...

I am a western person with a western world view and a western orientation in all things. Sorry, white folks do not own that view on things. Have fun in china!