Durst said. "Why the Moon? Quite simply, it's the quickest way to the stars. It's a catalyst. Once we have dominion of the Earth-Moon system, everything will open up for us. Not just Mars and Jupiter…but the whole thing."

Got that right.

The problem I see, is that Spudis and others seem to be thinking in terms of what's after ISS. This is something I hoped could have been avoided. There is no doubt in my mind that for the NASA bureaucracy, the Moon would be the next step after ISS. Lacking any movement and after tiring of pounding sand trying to get further funding ISS, the Moon is simply much "easier to do" than Mars. This is the wrong direction. What we need is commerical delevopment of the Moon. What we need is a small group within NASA doing a faster and better (and cheaper) lunar program to explore the Moon for minable deposits. This would not only speed up commerical delevopment of the Moon, but would also increase NASA speed in general and would also enable a Manned Mars in a quickier time frame. This "natural" and undirected movement of a bureacracy will probably lead to the ISS at the bottom of the Pacific, it will mean the public spending tens of billions on the next major program, and this program, without any doubt, will interfere with commerical development. This is serious governmental waste of tax dollars- the 100 billion for ISS will be basically a loss, and future tens to hundreds of billions will be wasted on The Lunar Program. And more important than the specific money of the tax payer, it's the time NASA will waste which thwarts commerical development which has potential of making trillions of dollars over this same time period NASA is squandering it's tens to hundreds of billions. And why do we do this, well one reason is some scientists want to live in some friggin cocoon- which can also be identified as the nesting behavior of the Dodo bird.