With the Shuttle program reaching it's final cycle, NASA had big plans to return to the Moon. With China, India, and Japan currently racing to be the next nation to land an astronaut on the lunar surface, NASA developed and then began testing a new lunar surface rover which had an extended range of over 60 miles!

It seemed, that NASA had every intention of returning to the Moon with the ultimate goal of a permanant manned presence there. However... Obama's "Human Spaceflight Plans Commitee" has stated that no manned landing on the Moon by the United States can take place before the year 2020... or perhaps even 2028, and further, mulling over the idea that a return to the lunar surface might not be the best direction for NASA.

It seems that the powers that be, desire a... "Deep Space Option". The deep space option is geared toward 3 specific tasks, which are, a manned landing on a near- earth asteroid,
flight to "Lagrange points" (areas of space where the gravitational pull of two large masses equals the centripetal force required to rotate with them) and the "Long Shot" option which places astronauts on Mar's moon Phobos.

One must ask... have we found and exploited everything there is to find on our own Moon? This "urgency" for mission clarification only arose after China succeeded in placing it's first manned crew into orbit. Perhaps there was a bit of panic about what we may have left unexplored up there and now having assured themselves that nothing more can be gained, those who are "in the know" so to speak can resume steering NASA toward an ultimate goal of a manned landing on Mars and the exploration of the ancient artifacts which await us there, on the surface and beneath.

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