The next question is: Are manned lunar and mars missions useful in any way? No.
Admittedly, there are alternatives to manned colonialization (e.g. seeding), but it seems rather worth exploring multiple options, considering the stakes.
> NASA's budget for fiscal year (FY) 2020 is $22.6 billion. It represents 0.48% of the $4.7 trillion the United States plans to spend in the fiscal year.
NASA uses less than half of 1 percent of the federal budget. If you care so much about budget waste, there are a myriad of other places you could complain about (how about defense or healthcare spending?)
The practical benefits of NASA's science and engineering efforts have been laid out many times in many different places. There are also less practical benefits; for example, how can you quantify the impact that the Blue Marble photo had on the environmental movement? That was only possible because we put someone on the Moon.
Curmudgeons like you will always be around, and those of us who enjoy seeing humanity push itself and accomplish incredible things are happy to ignore you :)
Solve that first, and then we can easily quantum teleport ourselves to anywhere in the solar system. Then reconstitute ourselves at the destination point. And hopefully your device didn’t make a quantum error during the rematerialization process.
You’d have to send the complement quantum teleportation receiver device to Mars, and set it up there first.
Then the device would have to rematerialize you back into fleshy form from pure quantum information residing in your quantum storage buffer.
Oh and make sure that a fly doesn’t enter the quantum teleportation device with you, as you initially get quantum scanned and dematerialized from Earth.
And you must enter the quantum teleportation device without any extra external clothing on. Since version 1 of the device has difficulty differentiating between organic and inorganic materials.
Once we colonize the solar system, the next frontier to explore will be interstellar travel. I think research on faster than light travel will be what brings teleportation to us rather than the other way around.
Even if FTL were indeed impossible, I think pursuing it would bring interesting discoveries and technologies.
I doubt the sort of teleportation you are talking about there could be made to work, but if we assume that it could, it would make Mars more like Antarctica than colonial North America. It would be a place to visit, but would just be a research appendage without its own self-sustaining population or manufacturing infrastructure.
We have the technology to do it now, but it would be a suicide mission.