TO THE MOON: Here's a fun article on new looks at lunar settlement, including that by the private sector and the prospects for future business: Building a Better Moonbase.

Sure, I'd like to see us go to Mars first, but there are a lot of good reasons to go to the Moon first instead, and this article touches on several of them. Chief among those reasons, for me, is the fact that economic activity on the Moon will be easier to bootstrap because of the proximity to Earth. This proximity makes the travel time and communications lag much shorter than for Mars, and "predictable" in the sense of varying little over the course of an orbit. There's no need to wait two years for a good launch window, or wonder whether your time-critical video mail will get to its recipient in a few minutes or a few tens of minutes. Of course, the short travel time (two days versus five months if your timing is lucky) is also important for logistics, particularly in case of emergencies due to unexpected shortages, medical crises, equipment failures or the like. So, in the short term, lunar settlement has its advantages over Mars.

On the other hand -- to rehash arguments made by many others -- Mars is a better long-term target for settlement precisely because of its lack of proximity to Earth. While a settlement on the Moon may eventually develop a level of self-sufficiency comparable to any given country on Earth -- exploiting its comparative advantages as a member of the "interglobal" economy, importing and exporting goods and services -- it will never have to become self-sufficient to any great degree and so will always be dependent on the home planet. The economics of transport will ensure that a Martian settlement will have no choice but to develop a very high degree of self-sufficiency. In a sense, if Mars is the new "Wild West", the Moon will at best be analogous to Britain -- dramatically different from the Old World, yet close to and integrated with it. It's in this independence (in the political and social spheres as well as economic) that the real allure of Mars lies.