re: Griffin tries to pitch "lifeboat Mars"
There's far more to it than a stable platform, Chris.
I know this is hard for you to accept, but most people just don't think its worth the money to send a few people either to Mars or to the Moon. What the public wants is for NASA to find the next threatening comet or asteroid before it hits and prevent it from happening, among other things, like figuring out how the weather works, figuring out how earthquakes happen and how tectonics work, improving the performance of earth observation satellites to the point they're useful, and a few dozen other things.
It just so happens that the Moon s the best place to find those asteroids and comets.