"You can use the existing infrastructure and be back on the moon in five to
10 years with a modest investment. You don't have to double the Nasa
budget," said Paul Spudis, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore, Maryland.

Though doubling, or even tripling the NASA budget wou7ld be nice.

Bush's election-year announcement is likely to face challenges from fiscal
conservatives and Democrats who want him to focus on domestic issues like
education and health care. But the ambitious proposal will strike a chord
with some lawmakers.

And with us space geeks. But to be honest, I'd rather see an increase
in support for education in the sciences before we go racing off to
the Moon or Mars.

Experts said the goal should be to set up a research base on the moon to
test technologies that would be useful on a mission to Mars.
"The idea is to go to Mars. And the way you get to Mars is you go to the
moon and you practise three days from home. It's the equivalent of climbing
Mount Rainier and preparing for Mount Everest," said Howard McCurdy, a
space-policy expert at American University in Washington.

Well, yesss.. but.. The Moon isn't Mars. They're two very different
environements. A Moon base would be nice, but Mars is far more
interesting. We already have a good environment for training for
Mars: Antarctica's dry valleys.

I support continued expansion into space, but I want to make sure that
we're doing it in a way that supports good science and in a way that
supports continued building on what has come before.