Pat Flannery wrote:
Although the Moon would make an obvious place to set up a base for
further exploration of the solar system

Why?

I can't see what benefit a lunar base provides for, say, travelling to
Mars, unless you're going to build spacecraft from lunar materials: in
which case you'll need a heck of a lot infrastructure to do so. Maybe a
little benefit for learning to live on other airless low-gravity moons,
but it seems a bit circular to build a base on the moon so that you can
practice for building bases on other moons without a good reason for
doing so in the first place.

Personally I have a strong suspicion that the first significant lunar
base will be a construction camp for the Copernicus Hilton a few
decades from now, not a NASA site.

Mark