Buliding a permanent base on Moon is not silly idea. that's very good idea
Depends on who you ask. There is the "let's go back to the Moon" crowd and there is the "let's go to Mars" crowd. And then there is maybe the group of people in between, who believe in a Moon program as a legitimate advancement of technologies for Mars, or a series of other exploration goals.
The fact is, as interesting as the Moon might be, Mars is a far more interesting, and a far richer, and more dynamic, destination. Mars has been the ultimate goal since before Sputnik- since the time of the first major visionaries of spaceflight. Mars was the inspiration for Goddard and even von Braun, who's original elaborate lunar exploration plans were clearly a lead-up to Mars travel.
I personally dislike intense interest in the Moon, because it is a good way to suck up potential funding for doing anything else- just as the Shuttle, promised to be the platform for further exploration- sucked up any funding for a BEO architecture, and at first even sucked away enough funding to prevent the original space station concept from coming to reality.
In Constellation, which was supposedly a Mars program, there were no concrete plans for Mars. Mars was just a "maybe after 2030". Constellation was just I Want To Do Apollo Again, with the objective of building a lunar base... with no concise definition of what Mars aspects were actually going to be tested on the lunar surface, or what actual Mars technology difficulties were going to be explored. It was the perfect 'oppurtunity' to suck funding away from Mars missions.
The Constellation-era Mars DRM 5.0 (Design Reference Mission) was, as far as I know, not that unlike earlier shuttle-era DRMs... apart from
a nearly 300% mass increase, to justify Mike Griffin's gigantic Ares V.
One interesting idea, that I'm not sure has been explored, is a true "Mars simulation" using the Moon- you would launch a mock Mars transfer vehicle out to the Earth-Moon Lagrange 2 point, loiter there for as much time as your Mars transfer would take, then transfer into lunar orbit and land (hopefully with a vehicle with some technology aboard in common with your prospective Mars lander), perform a surface exploration and stay using in-situ facilities (a simple base, mimicking the limitations of your habitation and equipment on Mars) for the amount of time you would stay on Mars, then launch and fly back to EML2, loiter for your simulated return duration, and then perform TEI and recovery back at Earth.
Such a mission could help answer various questions that we need to know about Mars exploration- such as human reaction to the BEO radiation environment and isolation from Earth, and performance in a partial-gravity environment after a relatively long duration exposure to microgravity. And it would be a clear path towards Mars exploration, and not be an aimless money-sink (a lot of the hardware could be similar or the same, such as the EML2 'hab' or mock Mars transfer vehicle).
Of course, the MPCV cannot even go to the surface of the Moon, since no lander for it exists. It cannot go to Mars, because all sorts of other stuff that would be required for a Mars mission, also doesn't exist. It might be able to go to an asteroid with other vehicles that are being studied now, but these vehicles would also cost billions of dollars to develop and construct.
So far, the only sure mission for the MPCV (provided an EDS exists for SLS) is an Apollo 8-like lunar orbit mission. That is really daring exploration, NASA. Really pushing the boundaries there. :dry:
