Geoff I'm not surprised by your reaction to the article.

I would expect you and Ken to attack Beattie on a personal bases. Of course he misstates Paul Spudis' views how else could he come to such idiotic conclusions...8-)

He is an expert without a "Mars Agenda" so must be called an idiot or some such thing.

Nothing he wrote is outright wrong. His opinion of the length of time to a visit to Mars is based mostly on NASA not having any human exploration of Mars on any schedule. The Vision for Space Exploration is very short sighted so to speak.

Spudis does have an agenda of his personal research and is willing to "sell" his soul to any devil that will get his data. If saying there are Moon Babas would get people to fund his data gathering . We would be hearing about these Lunar Dolls form Paul's pulpit.

I have said this sort of thing before and pretty much everything Beattie says about the Moon. It's just he has authority as an ex-planner from NASA.