new NASA goal

TodayNASA put out a longer term goal beyond just going back to the Moon in the form of a "permanent" lunar polar base. It seems to me that might be a tad premature since recently there has been some contradictory findings about whether or not there is water ice in the permanently shadowed craters in the lunar polar regions. Be that as it may, I have been thinking more and more that going back to the Moon might just be a dead end... it could sap funds and people's enthusiasm and delay us from other deep space destinations- namely Mars and the Near Earth Asteroids. Some alternatives to the Moon as a destination for human exploration were recently suggested by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA). There's a Space Review article on this topic here and the IAA report itself is here. I think the good thing about the Orion spacecraft architecture that is currently being developed is that it is not necessarily Moon-specific. If, as a result of the 2008 presidential election, the decision is made to re-orient the program from the Moon to first check out the Sun-Earth L2 point or some near Earth asteroid, I believe that could be done fairly efficiently. I really think such a reprioritization of goals might be in order, but nobody has asked me (!).