Now here’s an interesting subject. Scientists have suspected for the last couple years that the moon had very significant amounts of frozen water stored underground and in craters. One of the limiting factors to space colonization is H2O since it serves a dual purpose: water for human/mechanical consumption and being split for the hydrogen and oxygen components that are used to fuel rockets.

Andrea Thompson, Senior Editor of SPACE.com reports:

It’s official: There’s water ice on the moon, and lots of it. When melted, the water could potentially be used to drink or to extract hydrogen for rocket fuel.

NASA’s LCROSS probe discovered beds of water ice at the lunar south pole when it impacted the moon last month, mission scientists announced today. The findings confirm suspicions announced previously, and in a big way.

“Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit, we found a significant amount,” Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator from NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

The LCROSS probe impacted the lunar south pole at a crater called Cabeus on Oct. 9. The $79 million spacecraft, preceded by its Centaur rocket stage, hit the lunar surface in an effort to create a debris plume that could be analyzed by scientists for signs of water ice.

Snip …

Scientists have suspected that permanently shadowed craters at the south pole of the moon could be cold enough to keep water frozen at the surface based on detections of hydrogen by previous moon missions. Water has already been detected on the moon by a NASA-built instrument on board India’s now defunct Chandrayaan-1 probe and other spacecraft, though it was in very small amounts and bound to the dirt and dust of the lunar surface.

Water wasn’t the only compound seen in the debris plumes of the LCROSS impact.

“There’s a lot of stuff in there,” Colaprete said. What exactly those other compounds are hasn’t yet been determined, but could include organic materials that would hint at comet impacts in the past.

We need to keep something else in mind here. Water on the moon could be more valuable than anything else in the solar system over time. Besides water, there’s another limiting factor to human colonization of space: $10,000/pound.

That’s what’s required to send something from the surface of Earth to Earth orbit. Earth Escape Velocity is (if memory serves) about 11.2 km/s. That makes human colonization of the solar system VERY expensive.

That may not sound like much, but the moon’s escape velocity is only 2.4 km/s and would make things MUCH less expensive and we’d be able to ramp up solar system exploration and colonization a lot more rapidly.

It’s either factories on space stations in Earth/Lunar orbit or factories on a moon base. There really aren’t a whole lot of other options if we’re ever going to get out there.

Godspeed my friends!

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Tags: Earth, future, future scitech, H2O, LCROSS, LRO, Lunar ice, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, NASA, NASA Ames Research Center, physics, rocket, rocket science, science, SciTech, Space, technology, water ice moon