Austin Modine wrote today, over at The Register, about the selling of a new moon mission. Particularly a mission to establish what amounts to a colony on the moon, a permanent settlement. The underlying question is, simply put: why the Moon?

• It’s there. No, really. I flatly reject the notion that we have better things to spend our time and money on than space exploration; we waste tons of money on utter crap.
• It’s close. This is rather important, as we’re talking about long-term manned habitation of a hostile environment. If something goes wrong, we can get there a lot faster than if we skip ahead to Mars or one of the gas giants’ moons.
• It’s visible. Everybody can look up and see it, as opposed to the occasionally-visible Mars or the effectively invisible moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the other potential settlement targets. Once established, every man woman and child on Earth can look up and point to our new achievement: a permanent off-world settlement. Extra points if its lights are visible during the new moon.

There’s some boldly-going to do, folks. Hop to it.