Chris Carberry, CEO and founder of Explore Mars, a nonprofit Mars advocacy group, argues that far greater opportunities exist on Mars, and that a return to the moon might delay Mars settlement by decades. Mars has carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen—everything a colony needs to be self-sustaining. With those ingredients, you can do everything from manufacturing plastics to cultivating the soil. In other words, you can build a base on the moon, but a civilization on Mars. Moreover, Carberry says that the red planet has never been in a better position politically, culturally, or scientifically.

“Right now we have an unprecedented level of support for Mars exploration,” Carberry says. “Frankly it would be foolish to throw that away. There's a huge amount of support on Capitol Hill. The Senate just passed a transition bill with the strongest Mars language ever put into legislation. The House did a previous authorization bill with very strong Mars language as well. There are many years of bipartisan support for Mars—also for the moon, but the strongest emphasis is on Mars. That goes for industry as well. Boeing, Lockheed, Aerojet Rocketdyne, SpaceX, and others put quite a bit of effort into designing a mission architecture.”

American moon partisans owe a debt to Europe, which has tended the lunar flame during the ascent of Mars. Perhaps the most prominent moon advocate on Earth is Jan Woerner, the director general of the European Space Agency. Since assuming the post, he has argued persuasively that a “lunar village” is the natural successor to the aging International Space Station. It would be, in his view, a celestial point of harmony for a terrestrial species in discord. There is a problem, however: the Europeans have committed virtually no money to a moon village, and Russia, ESA's would-be partner in the venture, has no money to commit. They have already been forced to downsize their presence on the ISS due to costs, and have delayed plans for robotic exploration of the moon. (The head of the Russian space agency admits that Russia “does not have financial capabilities for advanced space projects.”) Lacking unity among member states, to say nothing of technology development and financial resources, what ESA really needs is for the United States to fund and spearhead such an effort. NASA's sights, however, are firmly fixed on Mars. With the presidential transition, however, and a new NASA director still to be appointed, lunar champions at home and abroad see an opportunity to abandon the Journey to Mars program and set sights a little closer to the Earth.

To that end, ESA is on a moon base public-relations offensive, from the light and easy (magazine spreads and aspirational illustrations) to bare-knuckled politics (publicly pressing the NASA administrator on the issue.) The overt message from Paris, where ESA is headquartered, is: We're doing this. The subtext is: While NASA plans a fantasy mission to Mars that will never happen, the rest of the world will be driving moon buggies and mining helium-3. But ESA’s campaign is powered by handwavium, and for all the illustrations of lunar domes and our great big blue marble over the horizon, progress on the moon base ends at Photoshop. If the U.S. doesn’t build the base, it won’t get built.