Helping O'Keefe put vision back into the space agency is the task of a NASA Exploration Team (NExT).

Drawing from talent resident at space agency centers, NExT is pulling together a long-term strategy for the agency, said Gary Martin, who chairs the NExT effort.

That strategy cuts across all of NASA's pockets of expertise. Teams are looking for technology gaps, and what strategic kinds of investment are needed to make decisions on how and where the agency should go in the years and decades to come.

"It's not just human exploration," Martin said. "It's a long-term space exploration strategy that's science driven, technology enabled, and human-robotic. That's our mantra," he told SPACE.com.

"It's not destination dependent," Martin said, alluding to an incremental ability to first create a way station far from Earth from which the Moon, asteroids, Mars and beyond become attainable.

NExT is squarely in line with one of O'Keefe's primary directives to explore the universe and search for life, Martin said.

For the European Space Agency (ESA), long range vision for human space exploration resides within the Aurora Program.

Just six months old, this new ESA activity is "discreetly moving forward," said Franco Ongaro, leader of Aurora at ESA’s Advanced Concepts and Studies Office in Paris, France.

Technical work on Aurora is underway with the first working meeting of experts in human exploration held in mid-July, Ongaro told SPACE.com. Experts have started to define a possible scenario for the human exploration of Mars and possibly the Moon, he said.

Ongaro said that prioritizing technology needs and precursor robotic missions are high on the Aurora program’s action item list.

"Clearly any scenario can only be indicative at this stage, said Ongaro. "Key questions on the existence of life or fossil traces of it on Mars, Martian environment, capacity of recovering water from the planet, role of the Moon, etc., have to be addressed in the coming years to consolidate the plans for a human mission."

Missing in action, however, is any public or political mandate to have humans scurry off beyond low Earth orbit.

In case you haven’t got the news, in the United States, the U.S. Congress and the White House haven’t placed human space exploration on the top 25 list of most important issues important to Americans.

"It is not a matter of if humans will venture beyond Earth orbit to Mars and beyond, but when," said Douglas A. O'Handley, Director of the NASA Astrobiology Academy. He is also a former deputy assistant administrator of NASA’s now defunct Office of Exploration in Washington, D.C.

So what conditions will change the priority set for human exploration?

O’Handley said conditions of competition with the Russians have clearly vanished.

"However there is the potential of the Chinese, Japanese, or Europeans making an attempt to go to the Moon…and perhaps to stay," O’Handley said. If that should happen, the U.S. Air Force would respectively ask if NASA were going to put the Moon back on its agenda…or the Air Force strikes out for "High Ground."

"My first prediction is that the Moon will follow the International Space Station for no other reason than economics. The Moon is a necessary engineering test bed for systems to be used on Mars. The Moon perhaps will become the site of the ‘Grand Observatories’ following on the heals of the ‘Great Observatories.’ These might be robotically constructed and eventually maintained by humans and upgraded as we have seen with the Hubble Space Telescope," O’Handley said.

Plunking down on lunar territory a colony of robots, O’Handley said, is yet another necessary step.

"It has the advantage of extending the human capability on the surface of either the moon or Mars. Mining remotely might also be a significant step too," O’Handley noted.

"We should definitely make every robotic mission to the Moon contribute assets to the eventual base. Obviously, the ice at the lunar poles is another source of fuel and oxygen for any base on the Moon. I have not even mentioned the possibility of beaming power to the Earth…another rational for returning to the Moon," O’Handley said.

O’Handley said that, thanks to the discovery of water ice very close to the Martian surface, life support becomes much easier to handle. However, new measurements of high radiation levels around Mars "might just be the show stopper for humans for a while," he said.

Until the scientific community gets behind the robotic demonstration of on-the-spot resource recovery and learning more about Mars radiation dangers, "we cannot properly engineer the solution to keep humans safe there," O’Handley said.

A sample return from Mars is now penciled in at the 2016 time frame. A single sample will be insufficient to engineer anything for a humans to Mars program.

"So until the planetary community realizes that life science issues are the Achilles heal of human exploration of Mars, I think the robotic exploration will rule the show. Eventually, we will have the answers," O’Handley concluded.