Robots can now perform, or be developed to perform, most of the tasks people would do at a moon station." Columnist Gregg Easterbrook, who has reported on the space program for decades, has criticized the plans as a poor use of resources. He writes that  Although, of course, the base could yield a great discovery, its scientific value is likely to be small while its price is extremely high. Worse, moon-base nonsense may for decades divert NASA resources from the agency's legitimate missions, draining funding from real needs in order to construct human history's silliest white elephant. According to Easterbrook, the billions of dollars that a lunar colony might cost should instead be devoted to exploring the Solar System with space probes; space observatories; and protecting the Earth from near-Earth asteroids. Buzz Aldrin, the second of twelve men to have walked on the Moon, disagrees with NASA's current goals and priorities, including their plans for a lunar outpost. While not necessarily opposed to sending people back to the Moon, Aldrin argues that NASA should concentrate on a crewed mission to Mars and leave further lunar exploration and the establishment of a base there to a consortium of other countries under U.S. leadership. In a July 2009 editorial in the "Washington Post", he said that NASA's Vision for Space Exploration "is not visionary; nor will it ultimately be successful in restoring American space leadership. Like its Apollo predecessor, this plan will prove to be a dead end littered with broken spacecraft, broken dreams and broken policies." He continued by saying that:  the lunar surface ... is a poor location for homesteading. The moon is a lifeless, barren world, its stark desolation matched by its hostility to all living things. And replaying the glory days of Apollo will not advance the cause of American space leadership or inspire the support and enthusiasm of the public and the next generation of space explorers.