I guess it’s time to give Mark Whittington the secret decoder ring, and initiate him into the Secret Brotherhood of Internet Rocketeers:

Clearly recent experience teaches us that simply telling the current NASA to go forth and build a lunar base is the last thing anyone would want to do. For NASA the construction of a lunar base would be the work of decades and at least tens of billions of dollars. If you like how NASA has managed the International Space Station, you