I would rather see all those precious resources to go for Venus mission. http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/nasa-study-proposes-airships-cloud-cities-for-venus-exploration

I see no one trying to go back to the moon ... instead all I see is trillions of $$ wasted sending robots to other planets and the occasional comet.

Why doesn't any government in the world fund experimental colonization projects ?

Why would/should they - what is in it for them?

As it stands at the moment no western nation can justify the cost of a manned mission anywhere due to the crippling debt these countries are in. At least it's not possible by a government agency like NASA right now.

This doesn't stop private companies tying though. ..

As it stands at the moment no western nation can justify the cost of a manned mission anywhere due to the crippling debt these countries are in. At least it's not possible by a government agency like NASA right now.

That doesn't keep those governments from spending an order of magnitude more than the paltry $18 billion NASA gets (just ~0.5% of the US federal budget) on military matters. NASA doesn't have funding to do these things because of a lack of political will to fund it. Other national space programs are in a similar place.

I remember reading an article that stipulated that the moon, unlike previous accounts, was actually drifting AWAY from the earth, making it very hard to predict where its orbit will adjust once it leaves the earth. For all we know, it could crash into the sun... not anytime soon, but you have to bear that in mind.

Well... yes, it was established quite a long time ago that the moon is slowly drifting away.

The Apollo Retroreflectors (actually, better link) measure the current speed at 3.8 cm per year. While it may eventually spiral away from the Earth, that won't be until after the expanding Sun starts burning up the planet.

The Moon is a good target for a permanent base, but there is not enough investment money to do much beyond a slow trickle toward the necessary technologies.

Mars is a feasible goal right now --- if you account for a one-way trip.

A fun detail is that while the Earth's gravity is too strong for a present-day space elevator, both the moon's gravity (1/6 of Earth) and Mars' gravity (1/3 of Earth) are low enough that a space elevator would work well after the initial investment. Once a functioning colony is established on one, it would be easier to use that is the staging area to establish the other. This could be repeated for many other locations, including the more habitable (but outside the easily habitable zone) moons of other planets.

A fun detail is that while the Earth's gravity is too strong for a present-day space elevator, both the moon's gravity (1/6 of Earth) and Mars' gravity (1/3 of Earth) are low enough that a space elevator would work well after the initial investment.

I doubt a space elevator would be any more feasible on the moon or Mars than Earth. In fact, it's probably less so. Consider that in order for a space elevator to not fall over, the elevator's center of mass needs to be in a place that doesn't move relative to the surface of the body it's attached to. On Earth, that means an equatorial geostationary orbit about 35,700km from the surface. Mars has an equivalent orbit, but Phobos orbits below that (since it takes less time than a Martian day to orbit Mars) meaning that eventually it would collide with the elevator.The Moon has no safe equivalent orbit since it's tidally locked with the Earth. Earth-Moon L2 wouldn't work, either, since the center of mass of the elevator would have to actually orbit the L2 and such orbits are not generally stable. The Sun's gravity would eventually pull the elevator away unless it had some kind of station-keeping system.

If those are the only two options, I would vote for Mars. There are still practical issues to be examined that are unique to a longer trip, such as Mars, compared with a "local" trip like the moon, which has already been safely reached several times. The implications of an off-Earth habitat, in the general case, will reflect Mars moreseo than the moon in terms of physical realities like supply and support from Earth. Mars would be a superior staging area for further space exploration and research due to its being further out in the solar system and not physically tied to Earth's location at any given time. And finally, work on Mars captures my imagination better than the Moon because of the relative novelty of missions to it. Public will is indispensable in huge, expensive undertakings, and I think it would take a far bigger mission to the Moon than to Mars to sustain the same level of enthusiasm.

My favourite thing about this thread is how keen people are to send a bunch of people to their deaths and waste a chunk of resources while doing so.

Some people are willing to die for exploration, and some aren't. Nothing is a waste when you learn something from it. I think most of us are engineers here, so we should understand what an iterative process is. You learn to walk by falling a lot.

Companies like SpaceX want to do this with a more budget oriented focus. Consider that this company was built from the ground up 10 years ago and is already delivering supplies to ISS, getting their rocket and next capsule man-rated and planning to bring back a reusable stage to land. That is very impressive progress for a private company. Their recent deal with Google for expanding a satellite network for internet is icing on the cake.

Aside from the reusability factor, there is nothing technically special about SpaceX's rockets. The company is just very efficient in handling the funds it receives and their rockets are built with vertical integration. It's pretty much like Ford in the early days where their main market advantage lies in the manufacturing process, and not the products themselves.

I see no one trying to go back to the moon ... instead all I see is trillions of $$ wasted sending robots to other planets and the occasional comet.

I'm not certain that the total sum spent by all space programs on Earth ever would even add up to $1 trillion.