NASA has made it clear for the last half decade that it considers Mars the next destination for its astronauts. Nevertheless, since President Obama took the Moon off the table during a 2010 space policy speech, potential partners for NASA's "Journey to Mars" have fallen by the wayside.

Earlier this decade, both China and Russia, the two nations now capable of launching humans into space, signaled their intentions to first explore the Moon. Now they have been joined by arguably NASA's most important partner in the coming years, the European Space Agency (ESA). In a new video titled "The Moon Awakens," the agency says it will take lessons learned from the International Space Station and team with other interested partners to return humans to Earth’s natural satellite by the end of the next decade.

"This new exploration will be achieved not in competition, as in the past, but through peaceful, international cooperation," the narrator says. "Eventually we will see a sustained infrastructure for research and exploration where humans will live and work for prolonged periods. Here we will put into practice the lessons of the International Space Station, to establish a facility akin to those we see in Antarctica today. In the future the moon can become a place where the nations of the world work together."

The only nod the video makes to exploring Mars is in characterizing the lunar surface as "a place where we can learn to move onward into the Solar System."

The video comes at a critical time for NASA with the United States entering into a presidential election year. Although space has played almost no role in the political discourse during the primaries, a new president will bring a new NASA administrator, one who is perhaps not as committed to President Obama's avoid-the-Moon strategy. Several of the leading Republican contenders, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, both played an important role in passing a recent law that allowed US companies to mine lunar resources, including water ice that could be converted into fuel.

NASA officials, including Bill Gerstenmaier, chief of the agency's human space flight operations, have indicated they will work with their international partners to facilitate their human landings on the Moon but that this is not an objective for NASA. This is largely because Obama so clearly took the Moon off the table during his 2010 speech, declaring, "We’ve been there before."

Europe's space agency appears to have joined the chorus of other international space groups that have set their sights on the Moon because it is close, has many potential resources from water to rare minerals, and because it offers an attainable goal. A number of independent groups, such as NASA's own advisory council and the National Research Council, have questioned whether NASA's aim to land humans on Mars in the 2030s is realistic given the agency's budget and Apollo-like strategy of building expensive, expendable rockets.

The new ESA video comes after a year in which its new director general, Johann-Dietrich Wörner, has spoken extensively about his ideas for a “Moon Village.” This concept would allow nations to collaborate to develop resources, such as water ice or rare metals. Moreover, they could also work toward becoming more self-sufficient in space by growing crops and harvesting other resources on the lunar surface.

Like US commercial companies, ESA appears to be interested in the polar regions of the Moon, where there are cratered areas of perpetual darkness that harbor water ice, as well as nearby areas that receive nearly continual sunshine and would provide a reliable source of solar energy. Recently the US Federal Aviation Administration endorsed the concept of a "Moon Village" and encouraged cooperation between US companies and Europe in future exploration.