US moon mission as useless as UK aircraft carriers
NASA's Constellation moon mission is about as useless scientifically as UK aircraft carriers, Romania's presidential palace.
Those are all big glossy expensive expenditures that supposedly boost the country's status, but which actually reduce its status by impoverishing it.
The moon does hold secrets, but I don't believe searching for those secrets is worth the money.
And we aren't going to build interstellar spaceships on the moon now that the ISS has proven we can construct them in orbit.
Much better to spend taxpayers hard earned dollars on:
1. Monitoring the earth's environment so we can one day accurately predict the weather more than 2 days in advance. Imagine the increase productivity of the world's farms if we could predict weather conditions far enough ahead that farmers could plant the optimum crop. Also imagine the savings in road maintenance, and road and ocean transportation costs if we could predict the weather one month ahead.
2. All the proposed remedies to global warming are very expensive. So more importantly, we need to know whether global warming is actually occurring, what its cause is, and whether anything we do in the future to affect it is actually working.
3. Greater scientific knowledge can be obtained by robotic exploration than manned exploration because robotic exploration is so much cheaper and delivers so much more bang for the buck.
However, as one of the other posters pointed out, let China start reaching for the moon and the USA will quickly react by building a US base on the moon.
Bipartisanship is dead in the US congress as far as saving the lives of US citizens through better healthcare, or keeping US families together by reducing unemployment. But one topic US congress is always united on is increased military spending.