Quote

There should be an international lunar base. That is certainly doable.

It's very dangerous to put astronauts on a moon base where there's radiation, solar flares and micro meteorites. It'd be much better to put robots on the moon and have them mentally connected to astronauts on the Earth.

The way I see it, commercial interests should manage a lunar base while NASA gets on with the really important task of flying to Mars.

I don't think there is much value in trying to use the moon as a base to go to Mars. That's going into one gravity belt and having to get back out of it again. And the moon doesn't have a lot to offer as a resource base.

If we don't do it, somebody else will. The Chinese, the Europeans and the Japanese all have the goal of going to the moon. Certainly we don't want to wake up and see that they have a base there before we do.

You wouldn't want to land on the Moon and launch to Mars. That would be very inefficient.

I think the future of lunar bases has to be somewhere around the South or North Pole. You have less variation in temperature and more daylight hours.

But I don't think we'll go there until we go back to the moon and develop a technology base for living and working and transporting ourselves through space.

Well, I don't think we should go to the moon. I think we maybe should send some politicians up there.