50 years ago, President John F. Kennedy told the United States
that man would go to the moon. Soon, another American president
may announce that the same celestial body will serve as a
waypoint for manned space exploration. The Verge has learned
that NASA intends to deploy a robotic lunar rover on the Moon in
2017 to search for water and other resources necessary for space
travel, and that NASA may have secured support from the White
House for an actual manned outpost — a space station — floating
above the far side of the moon.  Rumors of such a deep-space
outpost surfaced as early as February of this year, when a
leaked memo from a NASA administrator detailed an idea to build
a "human-tended waypoint" at Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 2
(EML-2): a point in space where balanced gravitational forces
allow an object to remain in stationary orbit relative to both
the Earth and the Moon. From there, NASA could launch missions
deeper into space — say, to Mars, or a near-Earth asteroid —
using the base as a stepping sto