The exciting stuff is not this interminable, dangerous FERRYING.
Go to the Jet Propulsion Lab site, out of Palo Alto, for some real eye candy! And, thankfully, not a wannabe, egotistical jockey in sight, just engineers and physicists and the cool stuff they're building.
Cut out the seats and the life-support supplies, and see what we could send. Why send a probe to Mars, just a probe?
Why not send an ARMADA of probes to Mars, en masse, to disperse and return data? Such a lack of inspiration...
You still need to "deliver the goods" so to speak. It would take a huge ground infrastructure and communications system.
I still advocate both approaches, manned and unmanned.