There are 2 goals that I think the populace as a whole shares, which could lead to their support for man tended facilities on the Moon.

The first of these is CAPS - finding an Earth impactor as early as possible provides time to do something about it. The Cassini images should allow the identification of the cometary component of this threat - and comet fragments are dark and very hard to see.

The other is the imaging of Earth-like planets around neighboring stars.

The icing on the Moon cake, not the core of it, is developing technologies for manned exploratory flights to Mars.

Might I suggest to the manned Mars enthusiasts that what they should be doing now is figuring out how to break their Mars ships into 20 ton chunks?

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