What does this "If the Mars Society team had been able to show they would have had the opportunity to do a session on requirement #7, designing a Moon or Mars base. Since all I had was a large amount of Moonbase resources and references that's what the homework assignment was. I eagerly await their results." mean?

You gave them a lot of info on the Moon and then proudly claimed they showed little interest in Mars? hmm. I've done a lot of class room discussion and have seen far more interets in Mars, but then I wasn't trying to push the Moon was I? I'll certainly admit to trying to encorage enthusiasm in Mars, but I usually pursue and encourage any interest in space and have given talks on the big moons of the solar system, astrobiology, the asteroid threat, and colonizing Space/Mars whatever the teachers felt their kids would be most interested in. I even gave middle school kids a chance to choose in a day long series of talks with various classes. Mars was definitely high on the interest scale.

Any statistically competant person knows this kind of anecdotal evidence from you and me is worthless in evaluating public opinion, but it is how we determine our individual opinions. I fully believe the "common sense" view is that going to the Moon is far easier than going to Mars. I also know that the portion of the public that understands calculus and chemical engineering is rather low probably in teh single digits or less. Most people don't have a clue about the delta v argument or any ability to judge the relative merits of various in-situ resource utilization proposals. Given that most polls show the choice between the Moon and Mars is close in the publics mind I have little doubt that if the public really believed that we could have gone to Mars with a Saturn 5 they would be pissed at the wasted potential.

Regards,
Mark