“Our focus is Mars. You know, getting back to the moon will be really hard. And we’re afraid that, if we focus as a nation on getting back to the moon – when we should be focused on doing somewhere beyond where we’ve gone before – that, you end up spending so much money on that hard problem, that, you severely delay solving what we consider should be the focus of the root of the problem we should be looking at. And that is getting to Mars. So, we consider it [the moon] more of a distraction if we’re talking about a national program.”

Gwynne Shotwell is the President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX
http://www.thespaceshow.com/detail.asp?q=2212