Replies

The United Nations will create a treaty making it effectively off-limits to anyone from earth, other than pre-determined United Nations NGOs. The United States will refuse to ratify or sign the treaty and the rest of the world will once again call us "reckless uni-lateralists". Woman and children will be the hardest affected. The contracts to build a vehicle to propel people to said planet will go to some organization with ties to the Presidential Administration, and massive-partisan investigations will be launched....

No cynicism here. No sir. Manifold: Time, and Manifold: Space, and Manifold: Origin, all by Stephen Baxter discuss some of these problems. He sends out a ship with squid onboard. Carefully selected squid. The squid eventually revolt, of course, and go into competition against us. Baxter is also very cynical about NASA and Congress getting anything together for space exploration and has a private person wheel and deal his way into privately funded space exploration while NASA and Congress try to stop him, which they nearly do.

I think it will be near impossible to get an expedition together due to all kinds of opposition from all quarters.