Living on the Moon

Probably the moon, just because it's closer and would be easier and shorter trip for transporting equipment. It would require less fuel, less oxygen on the ships, and so forth.

There was a pretty good plan for colonizing Mars a while back, but I think NASA rejected it for some reason. It takes like 6 months just to get to Mars from Earth when the two are at the closest parts of their orbits. For a trip like that, we'd need a space craft design right out of Star Trek to keep the astronauts from going stir crazy.

There was a rather impressive plan for establishing a base on the moon back in the 1950's made by one of the top NASA scientists, who happneded to be a former * scientist who was captured during WWII. But his plan was extremely radical and got rejected. The plan involved sending a manned fleet of around fifteen various specialized, nuclear powered, spacecraft. The bulk of the ships would be left on the moon and modified to setup the core of the base with the remainer of the craft used as personnal and supply ferries. It was a very sound concept actually, but there were safety and cost concerns over the development of the nuclear propoulsion engines the ships designs were based around.

That's a lot like the Mars plan I saw discussed on television. It called for sending several unmanned ships that would land on the planet and start converting the atmosphere into something that could support life. Then after a while, some more ships would be sent and connect to the others to form the basis of a station.

This plan was more recent, though. There was no discussion of nuclear stuff in it, for instance.

Everytime I hear about living on Mars I can't help but think of Total Recall

"Get your @$& to Mars!"