Mars is sexy and looks like a place --- people can see the pictures from the Mars rovers and imagine themselves being there. It's got weather and wind and inter

Mars is sexy and looks like a place --- people can see the pictures from the Mars rovers and imagine themselves being there. It's got weather and wind and interesting landscapes. It's featured in myths and legends for so long that it has a special place in people's heart. I can totally see it being used as the end goal of a fairly long plan. The Moon's not very sexy. It's all dusty blacks and greys. Everyone knows it's a dead rock, we've already been there, and public consciousness is dominated by the Apollo program pictures of astronauts in gigantic, bulky spacesuits. (This is mostly perpetrated by NASA unaccountably not sending any decent rovers to the Moon. Even the most recent lander, China's Chang'e, deliberately landed in the most boring place they could find. There aren't any interesting pictures of the moon because we haven't been anywhere interesting.) ISRU's hard there, too. There's water ice you can mine, but carbon? I don't know where you'd get that. But... if I were building a water ice mining plant destined for Mars, I'd want to test it somewhere. The Moon's a good place. So now I've landed an ITP ship with a mining rig. I'm going to load it with scientific instruments, too. And scientists. In fact, I might as well land two; it's good practice for Mars. And we're mining water, so we might as well use it, and help test the recycling systems. After all, the Moon's close enough that you can dash back to Earth in an emergency; it's the ideal place. We've got two ships; let's use one to recycle the crew on the other, and leave it there long term; there's plenty of interesting science to do, and it's all excellent practice. So I'd be really surprised if a long-term presence on the Moon didn't sneak into this plan by the back door. And then if a carbon source were to be discovered in large enough quantities for meaningful ISRU, then sourcing methane from the moon would slot neatly in.