What, you've never seen real women with silicone parts...?

I'm guessing they don't have the gag reflex...!

Hell, I miss the old SciFi channel...

"The cold war is over. "

No.

Robert Zubrin (literally) speaks for himself, here:

"Mining the Sky" by John S. Lewis (1996) comes immediately to mind.

Starlionblue, how much more are you willing to pay (and remember, NASA, like any government agency, uses other people's money) for the development of payloads worthy of an HLV?

When was any exploring society ever 'ready' culturally...?

And understand that even as high as it is, Olympus Mons has a very gentle slope, and its peak is almost out of what little atmosphere Mars has.

To PistachioWildebeest: Amen.

That's a desirable thing, but not one I'd try to sell to the public (except geeks like us that already get it). I can already hear the inevitable; "Well, we should use 'all that money' to try to prevent/fix problems that might threaten us, instead."

Consider everything that goes into manufacturing something like a space shuttle orbiter, or an ISS module...then imagine trying to duplicate that on the Moon. Are all the raw materials present? (The stuff of plastics, for example? Copper? Aluminum? Glass?) Are you going to create the infrastructure for everything…

"Seriously - we should be spending as much as we can afford on trying to get past two things: gravity and the speed of light. Once those are conquered the rest is easy."

"We could mine helium3 from the moon and have enough energy to provide all the needs of Earth for 10,000 years. "

"...and the drying of Mars probably has far more to do with it being a little planet than an unshielded one."

"We need a self-sufficient colony that isn't in Earth orbit or we risk either loosing all of the progress that we have made or just total extinction."

"We know it had life, "

Azures: People will ultimately do that too. Some people like gravity wells, and the relative stability of a planet, as opposed to a large man-made structure, and that's okay.

(shrug) It's not either/or, BeowulfRex...