Why doesn’t the government want us to go to the moon?

From the late 1960’s to the early 1970’s, man traveled to the moon as a temporary visitor.  We then stopped going to the moon, claiming that it was a dead ball of dirt with nothing more of consequence to discover.

Jump to 2010…we now know (for a fact) that the moon has “large quantities” of frozen water on it.  Making a permanent manned base on the moon not only feasible, but cost effective.  President George W. Bush, a man I have nothing but loathing for, called for America to return to the moon and build a permanent base back in about 2004.  I thought this nothing more than political rhetoric to drum up votes in Florida, which it may have been, but, it started a push involving billions of dollars to make this happen by 2020, just ten years from now.

So why, now that we know for a fact that there’s plentiful water on the moon that can used for fuel, drinking, oxygen supplies and many other things that would make a moon base self-sustaining, is our government now pulling the plug on plans to return to the moon and instead focusing on traveling to Mars and beyond, “IN THE FORSEEABLE FUTURE”, emphasis on “future”. 

Even IF our government was serious about traveling to Mars next, and I don’t believe they are, it would make so much more sense to already have a manned moon base where a mission to Mars could be launched from much more efficiently.  There have long been rumors labeled as “conspiracy theories” that when we traveled to the moon before, evidence was found of either extra-terrestrials, or some pre-human civilization that left evidence on the moon of their existence.  Has some group in our government put a stop to the return of man to the moon so that we can be kept in the dark about these rumors longer still?