Not soon enough in my opinion. Short-sightedness of politicians wanting quick fixes to problems they created, crippled the space programme.

Now it's a necessity for human survival!

We should have had colonies on the the moon 20 years ago!

You should watch the documentary called ...A funny thing happened on the way to the moon.

this is ridicolous, Moon + Base = Not Good.

hawking is absolutely right. if we dont get off this planet then we WILL die out

however, it's a better idea to build a tube-shaped, centrifugal station in space than waste money on a moon colony

1)it does not "adjust" astronauts to living in space. since the moon has low gravity, they will still experience cardiovascular decay, which would threaten their life if they went to mars. a centrifugal, orbital station could have gravity like earth's 2)it's easier to launch stuff from the moons surface than from earth's, but it's even easier to launch stuff from space than from the moon's surface 3)there are no resources on the moon except He-3 4)The south pole of the moon recieves sun 75% of the time, but a station in space would recieve sun 100% of the time 5)if you REALLY want to make a self-sufficient colony, you'd have to go somewhere with a lot of water, I.E. mars' ice caps or the Kuiper belt

Archie #5 - life in Scotland will be banned.

Labour Cooncillors booked for fact finding mission?

Imagine all the taxes that would be applied to moondwellers.... o2 tax, h2o tax, buggy-tax (based on emissions to punish the chelsea, sorry, sea-of-tranquility tractors). And imagine the expenses of members of moon parliament that the honest hardworking moon workers would have to ebar the brunt of.

We'll die out, moon or not. The sun's only good for another 4 billion years, the universe is either expanding or contracting (neither good for life).

There's this great part of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (the book Blade Runner was based on) where a colonist describes how all the 1950s pulp sci-fi is getting stolen from Earths libraries & sent to the colonies because the colonists are all so depressed & hate their lives & want to read about how it was supposed to be.

I love sci fi, but I think the money could be better spent making life here better. Though better spent on the moon than in bombing people.

You never know, the US might actually rent a few cubic metres of moon real estate to the rest of us,
providing we live by their rules of course.

Probably Blair, Brown and their wealthy friends will be first in the queue after they have helped to destroy planet earth and its Plebs by reducing it to heaps of nuclear dust!

This is all very Sci fi..do you really want future generations of luminious dwarves creeping about the moon?

Great! Lets send telephone sanitizers, hairdressers, reality TV celebs, politicians and city councillors on the first ship…

So China isn't going to be invited but Russia is needed to make it work. The odds are that the Chinese will already be there, perhaps jointly with the Russians. Currently Russia alone has a genuine capability to go regularly to space since the shuttle is now a PR programme more than a working system.

NASA is a bureaucratic nightmare very good at producing studies like this but not at doing anything & ESA, with a budget 1/3rd NASA's hasen't yet got a man above the atmosphere.

This whole programme is being predicated on exploring Mars rather than setting up space industry. Permanent space settlement depends on people being able to make money there. The Moon should be used to mine the metals to build solar power satelites & L5 colonies.

If 1/10 of the money NASA is currently wasting was put into X-Prizes such as helped Burt Rutan with Spaceship One we would have a permanent private Moonbase well before 2020.

So presumably the Moon Rovers and assorted abandoned equipment will still be there. Will this resolve once and for all the suspicion that the Moon landings were a hoax? Because if that gear isn't where it’s supposed to be, what are they going to say? The Aliens took it? But you know as well as I do the Americans won't let anyone near the landing sites. Until they're prepared them, or unless of course they really did get there. But you can't escape the impression that the US has been in the business of deception for decades. Just need one crack in the dam.

Excellent...A place where for Bush and Rumsfield to spend their remaining days.

This is madness, has nobody seen 'Alien'? 'Aliens' ?'Alien 3' ? 'Alien Resurrection'? Besides, they'll never find a studio big enough to film 'the moon base'. Let us die out, let us concentrate and fix this earth before ruining another one.

A base on the Moon is vital, but should be international. No one country should control space.
The idea of producing orbiting solar power satellites from lunar resources goes back to the sixties with O'niel habitas and virtually unlimited possibilities for the future, while putting an end to our destruction of our planet. It was never taken seriously because of cheap oil and geostrategic problems.
If we don't expand into space the only long term solution is a global society which maintains a perfect ecological balance for the rest of time, which is about 100 million years due to the slow heating of our star as it slowly climbs the Hertzprung-Russel chart. Earth will no longer be viable. Future generations, with little oil, strict economic limits and day-to-day survival problems won't have the capacity. It's now or never.

Would unlimited non-polluting cheap power not be useful in fixing the Earth? I doubt if many of the world's poor would agree.

And where will we put solar power satellites if not in space?

Good point Tennis. And what about 'Muppets in Space'? It will all end in disaster.

We lack every thing. We have Global warming at a massive scale. Now we go to moon and spoil the scenario. What will it be like when we darken the oceans with oil and the reflection with the pollution counts to zero visibility?
The new broom always sweeps well. We have a lady in the congress as the spokes woman don’t we. There is change in the climate. I hope this goes beyond and we have the Kyoto protocol signs and acted on. I do not know how we will tell our kids that moon is made of cheese??? I cant sleep

#13 don't forget the advertisers. We'll follow them say, about a week later.;-)

The USA's previous position that they would "deny access" to other countries http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HJ20Aa02.html
may not go down well with all the foreign countries whose help they need.

It does, however, explain why China isn't invited.

Chuckster #22 - A week later? Forget that there names and signs will already be plastered all over the place awating their first customers, you can bet that 'golden arches' will be there first.

expand in space ? well, stop watch Star Trek on tv !

The closer planet outside our solar system is at many light years. And it's nonviable !

It will be clever to protect our planet than to wait an immigration visa !

To my mind, Mister Bush want the moon in order to give a new goal to the US citizen so, they will maybe forget the shit we are all living in.
2nd, to control space
3rd to put his name in History.

the budget of this project = the whole budget of ESA (Europeen Space Agency)

He has cut in a lot of science project more useful to get the money.

All scientists in the world and particularly in USA said that going on the moon has absolutely no interest.

The nick name of M. Bush on the net is NapoléonXXIcentury ?

The idea of exploring space and settling far-off planets is a romantic notion of the human spirit. It is an innate desire to pursue infinity and immortality that all humanity shares. I've often pondered what the world would be like if all nations focused their resources on space exploration versus waging war.

We all know how it will end if dreams ever become reality though.
"When big space exploration ramps up it will be the corporations that name everything. IBM Stellasphere, Planet Starbucks. . ." Quote from Fight Club.

The poor will be left drowning in the polluted air our corporations have created while the elite shuttle away to regions unknown - perhaps for a better pasture, more probably to live out the last whimpering days of humanity.

God help the universe if we ever get out.

Female Speaker of the house.... pelosi isnt going to change ANYTHING... she's a POLITICIAN... did you not pay ANY attention? before the election... "we'll pull ALL the troops out NOW!" after the election... "we may need a draft to put MORE troops in"

then W pulls the rug out from under them revealing that the US is going to put major portions of Iraq under the control of the Iraqi governement... and only supply US troop support when local authorities request assistance from the Iraqi NATIONAL government and the Iraqi national government requests it...

Kyoto is dead... as far as the US goes anyway...

the ONLY way you will get the US involved is via a plan that is equal... france and the EU cant "buy" their way out... and the plan has to be VIABLE...

oh btw... you want to save the planet? you want us to go to space... stretch our reach...

the last technological leap we made was in the 60's when we were reaching for the stars...

you want to get off of fossil fuels? you want viable hydrogen fuel cells? go to the moon... you'll get them... guaranteed they need them for viable deep space exploration

Mike - It's a shame that every discussion eventually ends up denigrating our leaders. It's hard not to let other people's evil consume us, but in order for us to progress we will eventually have to let it go and just try our hardest not to become what we hate so much.

the reason china is "excluded" is that china has its own program...

the whole thing is called competition...

it's a GOOD thing...

and we are going to the moon because giant whirling doughnuts in space (to simulate gravity so we dont lose too much bone density) are fine for traveling... but long term there's too much of a chance of a marble sized chunk of whatever to punch a hole in you.... not to mention radiation issues...

on the moon they will dig in a few dozen meters below the surface and 1) be protected from the small chunks of stuff flying around in space... and 2) you'll be protected (somewhat) from radiation...

they'll mine hydrogen on the pole.... personally I'd bet that the chinese are ahead and by saying we want to go to the south they'll go there... and we'll get "stuck" with the north... where the sun doesnt shine as much... and there'll be more hydrogen... because the sun wont have evaporated it out into space...

next on the docket will be a mass accelerator (think an industrial japanese bullet train)... to launch stuff from the surface into space utilizing electrical power... instead of the precious hydrogen

next order of business will be mining metals... aluminum, titanium... and manufacturing things either on the surface or launching the refined metals into space and manufacturing them in zero G.... imagine Titanium alloy with the consistency of styrofoam... your entire car could weigh less than your wife!!!

all this.... and you wont have to worry about muslim terrorists!!!!

My objection was not to competition, which is indeed a good thing (I mentioned X-Prizes as the way to go which is competition personified) but to the idea that everybody but China will be grateful to play on the US team. I agree with you that there are knee jerk types who will automatically blame Bush & the USA for everything (even the weather nowadays) but equally there are things they really should be criticised for.

I am happier, even over the long term, about ONeill colonies if they are made big enough to have good radiation shielding. A meteor which made 1 hole in a big colony would almost always be repairable. On the other hand the inability to move out of the way of really massive meteors makes old fashioned planets pretty dangerous - just ask the dinosaurs.

Developing the solar system is engineering not science in that there is virtually nothing we do not know how to do now if we just apply time & money. We could build as many orbiting colonies as Star Trek has planets well before the end of this century if we had the gumption.

It all seems a bit sci-fi to me; I actually don't think it's necessary---or a great idea, for that matter.

Living on the moon is essential for future generations..The work we are doing now will pave the way for our great great great grandchildren!

Earth in 300 years will be a very different place. We will be exploring the universe at the speed of light and finding new galaxies and new worlds. The moon will assist us in our research. It may not make our lives easier, but then its not about us, its about the kids and the kids to come after them and so on!!

When the white man puts his mind to it he can achieve the most unbelievable things!

Intellectual white supremist alert...intellectual white supremist alert...intellectual white supremist alert....intellectual white supremist alert.......

Media 1 is in the house!

Taxi for Intellectual white supremist!...screeeeech bang wallop crash...geezpeace!

Joanna # 9, i think it's safe to say anything could happen in 4 billion years. I suspect that may be just enough time to work out how to get to another solar system. If we don't make it, it will be something else to blame, not the collapse of the sun.

Blimey in 4 billion years we'll probably have invented time travel.

JWP. It is said that the meek will inherit the Earth, the rest of us are going for the stars. However this is also a pretty good deal for the meek.