Interesting. Not sure that's the best way to spend NASA's "half a penny on the dollar" budget (as Neil DeGrasse Tyson puts it). It seems like a solution in search of a real problem or objective. Why put people at an L2 orbit to get rocks from the moon... wouldn't it be easier to just go directly back to the moon and return?
The L2 point is where the James Webb Telescope will be... so I suppose NASA could propose that being able to get there would enable servicing missions but seems like those types of missions would be more expensive than Hubble missions and I don't know that the JWST is being built with servicing missions in mind (swappable modules, etc).
Fuel depot to Mars... also seems like a short-sighted idea. Not exactly sure to what degree a manned flight to Mars would require a refuel after launch, but seems like we'd have to spend and risk an awful lot of money and life just to get fuel safely stored at that point, in a way that could be offloaded onto a ship that arrives there on its way to MArs or somewhere else. Wouldn't it be better to have a fuel station much closer to earth? Both in terms of cost, risk, and making it easier to fix if something goes wrong initially? The launch itself is the biggest fuel guzzler so... why would the refueling need to be so far away?
...into the light of a dark black night.
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