I guess the hope is shifting to private endeavors, as the technology ripens and the costs drop into the range where corporations and rich individuals can fund their own spaceflight. They call it becoming a spacefaring nation.
Even as NASA is cultivating a competitive commercial industry for heavy lift and establishing commercial spaceports (eight already available), they are still developing more basic technology in-house, and doing deliberate planning for big objectives like permanent bases.
One thing that I have been excited about, has been a bit of a revival in nuclear power for space applications. Both the US and Russia have new small nuclear reactors being developed for space use (10 KW to 1 MW), rather than the relatively low power nuclear batteries that have been in operation. These power levels could support long term bases or even electromagnetic drive (EM Drive) propulsion, which now seems increasingly plausible.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/evaluating-nasas-futuristic-em-drive/
EM Drives would allow spacecraft to not carry tons of fuel for in space propulsion or orbital control (they would still need chemical fuel for takeoff or controlled landing). Small nukes the size of a couple of five gallon buckets could drive continuous thrust for ten years or more. With continuous acceleration, the trip to Mars could be cut to a matter of weeks.
Small nukes? See Project Orion - nuclear pulse engines. “Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970”
Smallest ship would have carried a crew of 150 ... Fresh water by the tons used on outer shell as insulation from particles. Interstellar versions planned. Killed 1965
“Sixteen stories high, shaped like the tip of a bullet, and with a pusher plate 41m in diameter, the spacecraft would have utilized a launch pad composed of eight towers, each 76m high. Remarkably, most of the takeoff mass of about 10,000 tons would have gone into orbit. The bomb units ejected on takeoff at a rate of one per second would have yielded 0.1 kiloton; then, as the vehicle accelerated, the ejection rate would have slowed and the yield increased, until 20-kiloton bombs would have been exploding every 10 seconds.”
The whole of this rested on designing very small, efficient, reliable nukes - the only guy who could do it well left the field ... has someone else picked it up? Don’t know, but these are also tactial battlefield nuclear weapons. The other problem was steering the ship precisely.
To Mars By A Bomb - The Secret History of Project Orion (Nuclear Propulsion)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYoLcJuBtOw