The Moon should have had dozens of robot exploration missions over the years instead of wasting money and effort on Mars. The Mars mafia has set back humankind expanding into the solar system by a couple decades at least. Bob Zubrin, Elon Musk, and all the rest of the fools promoting that rock as the next destination have done a great deal of unrealized damage.

If the Moon had been the focus we would likely have several Lava Tubes the size of small cities located and millions of tons of ice ready to be exploited. Instead we flushed billions down the drain on the stupidity that is Mars.

why? why would we have lava tubes full of cities what would they do

Factories making things like space solar power satellites, massive alloy discs for pulse propulsion spaceships, the first miles in diameter artificial hollow spinning moon sections, etc. Launched into space using 20 to 25 times less energy than from Earth.

You know, what we should have been doing a couple decades ago.

To the extent any of that actually happens - and it mostly won't because it makes no sense - the industrialization of the Moon is going to be a project of private enterprise, not of governments - including ours.

Trump/Musk fanboy, climate denier, troll....you have them all covered.

Except for space enthusiast. You and your gang are the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. Ayn-Rand-in-space whack jobs.