Ok, I'm wondering if we can all agree now that there is SOME water on Mars, and there is PROBABLY some WATER on the Moon.

Yet the poor administrators(managers) are still required to stick to the "is there/was there ever Life on Mars?" script, and my heart goes right out to them.

Because the fundamental question of "is there/was there ever Life Anywhere?" remains, and fundamentally, the question mentioned in the previous paragraph can always be argued to be fundamentally subsidiary to the fundamental question, and is therefore always Important.

The overwhelmingly probable truth of our situation is that while Mars harbors SOME water, it is never found in liquid form, and even though there have been epochs and/or events in the distant past during which liquid water flowed on the surface of Mars, it matters not to the present reality, as just noted.

Was there ever life on Mars? Speaking of liklihoods, in my dopey opinion the liklihood of life ever on Mars is at least much as the liklihood of life ever on the Moon.

The real question that we must as a species learn to ask is of course, "is there/was there ever life anywhere, anywhere of practical interest that is, and the latter qualification cannot be over-emphasized.

"Anywhere of practical interest" means our galaxy or closer. Maybe a lot closer. But with thousands of stars only a few tens of light years away, 'anywhere' is still pretty god-damned big.

"...the fundamental question of "is there/was there ever Life Anywhere?" remains..."

I think that question can pretty conclusively be answered in the affirmative.

"The overwhelmingly probable truth of our situation is that while Mars harbors SOME water, it is never found in liquid form, and even though there have been epochs and/or events in the distant past during which liquid water flowed on the surface of Mars, it matters not to the present reality, as just noted."

I don't know that "never found in liquid form" is 'probably true'. I would expect water aquifers to exist deep underground, kept liquid by a combination of pressure and residual internal heat from the core. Note too that glaciers slide on layers of liquid water produced deep beneath the ice by pressure and friction(http://nsidc.org/glaciers/story/move.html) -- if any of the persistent water ice at the poles (or elsewhere) behaves like glaciers on Earth, there could be a liquid water environment deep beneath. Liquid water exists in large lakes beneath permanent ice sheets in the Antarctic (http://salegos-scar.montana.edu/). I'd say the fact that similar circumstances on Mars could result in similar pockets of liquid water there matters indeed.

The likelihood of life having existed on the Moon is *far* less than that of it having existed on Mars. The conditions on the Moon, to our present understanding and data, were never conducive to the maintenance of life (http://www-curator.jsc.nasa.gov/curator/lunar/lunar10.htm). Present surface conditions on Mars (thought to be much less favorable to life than they were in the distant past) are not all that different from extreme environments on Earth in which life has been found, and even excluding those possible niches on/near the surface, the protected and stable subsurface soil, rocks, and aquifers could be rich with simple organisms -- just as they are on Earth.

As for the rest of your post, I'm not really sure what the argument is. Are you saying we shouldn't go to Mars because there may be nearby solar systems where life is present?