I hope there wouldn't be a groundswell, it would make an amazing way to burn cash.

It's not viable on their budget. Fundamentally the way rockets are right now, it's like bulk freight, the faster you want to travel the more its gonna cost, but it doesn't make too much difference which company you go with. That speed thing is fairly important. When we send our Robots they don't breathe, or eat, or suffer from radiation since we build them sturdy on that score as we power them with plutonium. They also don't require state funerals when we crash them into a planet at hypersonic velocities... the success rate on Mars mission has been less than 50/50, the last two before Curiosity never even made it out of Earth orbit, admittedly those were Russian and Chinese, not NASA, but NASA's crashed it's fair share of probes and the Russians and Chinese (and the Brits crashed one in 2003) are none of them amateurs at rocketry, compared to any private firm, also those ICBMS and cruise missiles make for good practice. This is a small Dutch start-up trying to tackle a manned expedition to Mars when NASA is the only group even breaking 50% non-catastrophic failure on getting relatively small objects there intact. Curiosity cost 20 or 30 times as much as the UK's Beagle 2, the aforementioned crash, and you remember how amazed (rightly) everyone was that that mission worked. That was just to land a one ton probe.

When you shift from robots to people you need to keep them alive that whole time, and each component you add increases mass and every ounce you shave off increases the odds of catastrophic failure. We run budgets parallel to what these guys have just to land a ton on Mars with about a 50% success rate, we'd be talking about the need to land at least a few hundred tons on Mars. Preferably thousands of tons.

How about food? Are we going to fly it in? Those rations are real light, about half a pound a day a person, but it means every year those 4 people will need 800 pounds of food. Unless they supplement with growing food, which would need mass for various domes and so on. Last I heard the pick for that was PCTFE, which a single layer runs just under two pounds for 10'x10' sheet. A for man team is going to need a couple tons of material minimum for each each year, one way or another, and more is better. Things will break and the experts will be 8+ minutes away, not lie now or even with the moon where they could still effectively talk real time from Houston to the Moon with a few seconds of pause between response. There's not going to be hundreds of top experts sitting there walking you through repair or improv and there's a limit to training and tutorial videos, so even more redundancy is needed and even more mass, and on and on.