<p>One reaction to President Bush's plan for a permanent moon base and a trip to Mars is, "Great! It's about time NASA stopped going around in circles in low Earth orbit and returns to real science and exploration." Unfortunately, there's not a snowball's chance in the sun that the same agency that currently is constructing a downsized version of its originally planned space station, decades behind schedule, at 10 times its original budget, a few hundred miles up in orbit, will be able to build a station several hundred thousand miles away on the moon.</p>