The moon has it's merits, but if NASA wants to get the public excited for space travel and rake in the money for future missions, they'd go with Mars.

Mars. For sure.

The moon? Been there, done that. When we get to Mars, we will look into colonizing the moon. I agree getting the publics attention will be a great great thing if they were to choose mars.

The Moon.

When I was a kid people talked a lot about using space to get kids excited. My question is excited about what? If we are getting kids interested in going to space because they will actuallly be able to go there then that's great, but there really aren't that many people who have gone to space, so most of those kids just got let down. (like ME!)

People often talk about terraforming Mars. Well news flash that will take tens of thousands of years so I don't think we really need to rush. None of us will see a Mars with an earth like atmosphere no matter how much money we put into it. Neither will our kids, or our kids kids etc.

Mars isn't very useful for much. We will almost certainly find life there, and that will be one of the most amazing discoveries of all time, but then what? The Moon on the other hand is the perfect place to do expirements in near vacume conditions, and extreamly cold cryogenic tempatures. New materials that can and will be used on Earth will be developed and manufactured on the Earth's Moon.

Helium 3 is something often talked about. Phage recently posted that if you don't have an H3 reactor then you don't have a need for H3. This is silly. You need H3 in order to learn how to build the reactor. What came first the chicken or the egg? In the case of using H3 in a reactor the H3 would have to come first.

There are more reasons to go to the Moon and things that will be developed there but I'll leave it here for now. But before I end this post I want to bring up one more thing... Asteroids.

Some say that everything we can do on the Moon we can do on Asreroids. Well OK, but why go all the way past Mars to the asteroid belt to do these things when you can just travel a few days to the Moon? What a waist of time and money. I've heard some say we could capture an asteroid and put it in Earth orbit. What? I assure you that would not be easy and we aren't even close to being able to do that. Even if we could why would we risk it? Just one misfired thruster and we go the way of the dinosaur.

Are there asteroids closer to earth than the Moon? If so what are their orbits? I imagine they might come closer to earth at times but then swing back out much further. If there are any good close by asteroids that anyone knows of could you please provide some links? I've never heard anyone mention a specific asteroid that would be worth going to.

The Moon.
Build a shipyard, big ships made with Lunar Titanium, fueled by He3 in Fusion Drives.
Then go to Mars.

The Moon of course. The main reason to leave earth at all is to preserve humanity. The moon is a great lifeboat should things turn sour here. Many humans could survive on mars if something catastrophic happens here on earth.

The moon is close enough to us to allow us to arrange a quick escape for some number of humans in short order.

Mars should certainly be explored and considered for a colony over time. I would rather go to Ceres or Vespa to colonize them before mars though. They are further away, probably have a lot of water and could help extend humanity further away from the sun which one day will do bad things to earth and mars.

Originally posted by Cosmic4life
The Moon.
Build a shipyard, big ships made with Lunar Titanium, fueled by He3 in Fusion Drives.
Then go to Mars.

I think we need to make the Starships out of Aluminum Oxynitride.
Apparently, it has a high melting point and it provides impressive
armor in case you run into an asteroid. Chinese companies are
now making it cheap! Transparent Aluminum soda cans!
They are also putting the AlN armor on their top of the line tanks.
New armor is able to withstand numerous T-72 tank hits.
----------------------------------------------------------
Lets go to the moon and get the Helium-3.
Lets build a Star Trek medium sized Space Station and put it
in orbit of the moon. Jobs....Jobs....Jobs!

[edit on 29-9-2009 by Eurisko2012]

I'd like to see Humans go to both eventually, but for now I think the Moon would be better, as it's much closer.

We've only been on the Moon 6 times, so there is still plenty to explore and learn. The knowledge gained and technologies developed for living and working on the Moon can then be applied to living on Mars. It just seems like a wiser use of what little funding there is, in my opinion.

As for getting HE-3 from the Moon. I don't think that would be practical or an economical idea for a long while. It would be much easier and cheaper to get it on Earth than from the Moon. Plus the first commercial Fusion reactors will probably be D-T or D-D reactors and those are still at least 50 years away. HE-3, from what I've read, will be used in second generation Fusion reactors.

[edit on 29-9-2009 by jra]