Last week’s poll: going back to the Moon

Half a century on, it seems engineers are overwhelmingly in favour of humans returning to the Moon, with 55 per cent viewing Earth's satellite as an important stepping stone on the journey to Mars. Conversely, more than a fifth (21 per cent) of readers felt that advances in robotic exploration meant that this was a more sensible option for future lunar mission and could tell us all we needed to know.

A not insignificant 14 per cent believe that our return to the Moon should be based around the search for resources, which itself could pre-empt yet further exploration of our solar system for activities such as asteroid mining.

The final 10 per cent of the vote was evenly split between readers who chose the 'none of the above' option and those who feel that we already know all we need to about the Moon, and as such should not be sending crewed missions back there.