You miss my point Larry. The president's speech told of a mission to the Moon, Mars and Beyond and as soon as they dropped the term M, M&B for a Vision for Space Exploration they dropped destinations for philosophy.

NASA won't be making some major changes to a 25 year old architecture in the 2020s to fly it to Mars. We will not have the methane/lox engines needed for the mission to Mars and beyond. We will not be engineering things for beyond the Moon (if the Moon is still really on the short list anymore).

We have more than 40 years in space now the argument that we need to return to the Moon to learn what we should have already learned is simply BS! And we are going down a path were anything we learn will not apply to Mars and beyond. All justified by getting there "soonest"!

The Moon is a much harsher environment than Mars. It's dust problem is not Mars', there unique to the Moon and it's vacuum with little weathering and constant micrometeoroid bombardment. Lunar mission architecture will not now resemble Mars mission architecture anymore than Gemini mission architecture does. We would be better served by doing studies in LEO at ISS for Mars and beyond than wasting tax payers money faking things at the Moon!

You and I know NASA, this changing to "off the shelf" engines will not be an actual time and money saver. The folks at Pratt & Whitney seem to believe the conversion of RL-10s to methane would be easy.

This decision is akin to the one made over aluminum or titanium skin for the shuttle. It will effect the utility of the architecture for beyond the Moon and invalidates the January 14, 2004 speech of Bush.