Back to the moon, or beyond?

TAMPA - The first men to walk on the moon told President Obama on this 40th anniversary of their first footsteps there that they don't want NASA to go back to the moon -- unless it's just a quick stepping stone to somewhere else, like Mars.

"To me, exploration is going to someplace you haven't been before," said Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. He's talking about Mars, of course, the place where all the Apollo moonwalkers say they thought we'd be by now.

"We can venture outward to Mars for America's future," Aldrin said. "It may sound like a distant destination beyond our reach, but that is what some called Apollo, our goal to reach the moon, and they were wrong."

Walter Cunningham was on Apollo 7, and said the space program was the economic stimulus of the day.

"It was a driver of technology that really helped make us the leading economic force in the world," he said.

"There was not one dime spent on the moon", says Charles Duke. "It was all spent in America, and it created technologies that we all enjoy today. My Blackberry has 65,000 times the memory of the Apollo computer."

"What are we doing today?" asks Cunnignham. "What investment are we making today that will ensure that we have that kind of return for the next 30 years? I don't see it out there."

The moon walkers say, save the aging shuttles, there's not been any really new space technology since Apollo, and they pull no punches about the $100 billion dollar international space station. By now, they say, we ought to be on Mars, instead of sitting in low earth orbit.

"We spent a lot of money up there for almost nothing," says Apollo 13's Jim Lovell. "It's almost a white elephant, and until we can get a return on our investment of that project, then it was money wasted."

Lovell says to get that money back, we should be developing new technology for Mars aboard the station.

The Moon anniversary finds the U.S. space program at a crossroads, with the Obama administration looking at its options, reconsidering a return to the Moon on the way to Mars.

Cunningham and the other moon veterans say it's a simple formula:

"Unless we have the funding to do it, it doesn't make any difference which option they take. Unless we're willing to pay the price, the American public is not going to have a very aggressive space program again," he said.