Moon before Mars

Imagine a place with both perpetual sunlight and perpetual darkness. This is our Moon, whose colonisation by humanity now seems all but certain. Not that it was ever in much doubt, for man has never yet visited a territory without returning to it. But recent NASA activities–in inviting scientists to reveal their favoured lunar landing sites–and the ambitions of the private sector and of foreign space agencies, all suggest the probability of manned lunar bases within 20 years if not sooner.
	It has never seemed very likely to me that people would bypass the Moon and go directly to Mars on the grounds that ``we've been there and done that.'' For Mars, being so much further away and so cut off from Earth, will be a much more dangerous planet to live on. Living on Mars will require a significantly more advanced technology than we now possess. For example, on a world from which it will take several months to get people back home in an emergency, then medical services of extraordinary quality will be needed. But if, as on the Moon, the homeward journey is unlikely to exceed three or four days, then these can be much less elaborate.
While the usefulness to the rest of humanity of Martian colonisation has not yet become absolutely clear, that of the Moon is indisputable. A network of optical telescopes on the Moon's near side should provide resolutions 100,000 times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. And radio telescopes on the far side, where Earth is forever invisible and human radio pollution is completely absent, will be the surest means to discover signs of alien civilisations. Lunar industry will be as beneficial as pure science. With a surface area larger than Africa's, it will assist the Earth with a strong industrial economy based on highly advanced medical, nuclear, electronic, metallurgical and material processing technologies. And terraforming will ultimately turn large parts of its barren surface into a lush oasis of life. Shipping completed products to Earth will be astonishingly easy. The weakness of the lunar gravity, one sixth of Earth's, and the Moon's low mass, one eightieth of Earth's, will reduce the energy needed to travel from the Moon into space to only a thirtieth of that needed to travel from Earth into space! Above all, the experience of building profitable settlements on the Moon will give mankind the self‑confidence to go further afield and colonise Mars. Far better to venture on to a distant world if one has already lived on another closer to home. And the Moon has an asset that may be unique in the Solar System. It has regions that exist in perpetual sunlight. Near the crater Peary at the lunar South Pole, according to the findings of the spacecraft Clementine that explored the Moon in 1994, these regions are never touched by shadow. This seems to offer a perfect opportunity for flooding the Moon with electricity from solar energy. And nearby, it is believed, are craters in perpetual darkness, which are thought likely to contain ice that will prove essential to civilisation. The Moon beckons.