If we plan on establishing a permanent base station on the Moon, or if we plan on travelling beyond the Moon to distant planets, we will need to know just what medical effects long term exposure to zero gravity will have on the human body.

That's true Guy, but I think we've already gotten most of that from several years of Mir. Jerry Linengar's (sp?) book a few years back gave some nice detail about issues that came up after he spent several months up there. He was still suffering from bone demineralization a year after returning--even with a lot of advanced therapy. The Russian commander was nearly suicidal because the mission directors blamed him for a collision with a Progress capsule. I think we could still learn an awful lot from the Russians if we could get past our own technological snobbery. They actually learned a lot from a minimal, non-expandable platform (Mir). We built this great fancy, infinitely expandable boondoggle that requires constant attention from the 2 guys stuck up there. And we still depend on that clunky Russian stuff to take food to them. Skylab was a great example of well-applied cleverness. We cobbled the thing together out of available spare parts and got a lot of good out of it until it fell down. The ISS is the result of a unholy alliance among politicians, contractors and the careerists who took over NASA.