The panama canal was an audacious project. Many obstacles had to be overcome in the massive engineering project. The difference between the panama canal and the proposed moon base, is that the panama canal if completed was going to be of tremendous economic benefit.

I've got many problems with the lunar base proposal, with the main ones being the reasons for doing it are questionable. Preparation for Mars on the earth vs the moon NASA has thrown up a hodge podge of reasons for human lunar landing and moonbase, and is currently waiting to see if anything will stick. One of their reasons is to learn "how to live in hostile environments", as a precursor to human exploration of Mars. Another reason is the flushing out of equipment (e.g. life support) to get it up to reliability required for Mars missions.

Sorry, but these reasons aren't convincing for me at all. Why spend 1/4 trillion dollars do this stuff on the moon, when we could for orders of magnitude less cost simply simulate self contained habitats on earth. Already, NASA uses underwater habitats to perform studies. Teleoperation complete with simulated communication delays, simulated radiation environments, creating closed systems to check out life support equipment could and should all be done on earth.

One of the issues that has obvious problems of being simulated is low gravity environments. However, it seems to me rather than spend so much money to go to the moon to use a gravity environment that is not the same as mars, why can't we finally get some use out of the white elephant space station? One of the few legitimate reasons for having the damn thing was to do human low gravity studies. Yet, NASA has taken out the centrifuge component that was to be used to simulate different gravity environments from the space station. Instead of spending the money on the space station we must start over and go to the moon and still be lacking in knowledge for mars.

Robotic reconnaisance of the moon makes sense. Finding out information about resources and their accessibility on the moon could open up some opportunities. It makes no sense to make these plans for human landing without solid reasons for doing so. I seen no convincing arguments that we need to put any kind of base or human landing on the moon as a precursor to mars missions. And I have yet to see how human presence will be more cost effective to accomplish any goal that we currently have on the moon with the current information.

Humans should not visit the moon or mars until we have
1) have reliable launch and landing capability that can soft land accurately (at a base).
2) have set up habitats through the use of robotic probes and teleoperation
3) have verified habitats life support reliability BEFORE human presence
4) have performed adequate gravity and radiation experiments/studies to uunderstand and remediate the radiation environments and gravity environments. (remediated environments should be part of step 2 and already built in before human arrival).
5) have communication issues dominated--massive bandwidth with no drop coverage whereever we go.
6) have power situation dominated(nuclear or solar...plenty of power)--with power station that allows automatic recharging of mobile robotic helpers
7) have some real reason to go to the moon/mars with humans. Human presence should be justified economically (i'm not talking about profitability, but some reasonable cost vs return of product--which is currently information). Unless we can SUSTAIN presence (by living off the land), at a fairly reasonable cost we should not do this. By doing this prematurely (before technology can support it) we only delay the whole program.

We still need to do so many experiments, studies, and reconnaisance to understand the opportunies and problems we face, we simply should not make plans (about bases) until we get answers. There is no doubt we need to replace the shuttle with a next generation launch capability. Those plans should go forward. As far as the moon and mars, we should require the launch capability to be able to support missions to those places as well as space stations and near earth objects and locations like asteroids and L2. Base plans should go forward only to the extent to figure out the economics involved to develop methodologies to ultimate make it cost reasonable.