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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

I think the wealthy would rather take a vacation to the moon.

Likely, but the ice-mining scheme will be much easier to pull off, and will therefore be possible sooner, and is therefore more likely to be the primary means by which these resources are exploited.

To save mass (and thus cost) they'll probably dehydrate the water before shipping it back to Earth. Their target market won't care.

Or they could sell it in different concentrations. You can get 1% moonwater for $1000/bottle, or 99% moonwater for $100K/bottle.

I think you could do better selling it homeopathic. 1x10^-12 is way more expensive!

10^-12 is only a 6C dilution. The dilution advocated by Hahnemann is 30C, which is 10^-60. Oscillococcinum is at 200C (10^-400).

They could also split it up, and ship the gases in compressed form.

Because oxygen and especially hydrogen are such a pain to store compared to water some rocket designs contemplate just leaving all the fuel mass as water and only splitting it into its parts as needed before firing.

Water is also effective at blocking radiation [0][1], making it especially useful when stored around the spacecraft occupants.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Can-we-use-water-or-ice-as-radiation-s...

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/284275main_Radiation_HS_Mod3.pdf (page 4)

Don't you need an energy source to turn the water into its parts? That's the energy you recoup when you burn the hydrogen. Or did I miss the joke?

Presumably this would be done with a small nuclear reactor powering an electrolysis system, in which case it’s feasible. Your savings are in complexity and weight because containing a mass of water is trivial, and naturally dense compared to H or O. As an extra feature you need water anyway, it can be used as a coolant, and you need oxygen which you’re now generating as a byproduct. Presumably for cruising you’d use the nuclear reactor to power an ion drive and only use the Water splitter as needed for maneuvering, launches, and landing.

South pole - perfect place for constant solar power. Just raise it up a little bit.

On the other hand, they also believe in homeopathy, so you would only need 1 litre of moon water to produce billions.

edit: excalibur beat me to it.

Let the wealthy pay tons of money to go work the ice mines in the moon for a few weeks at a time while it has its novelty. Kill 2 birds with one stone.

I like the idea of sploooshing around in a sublunarrean swimming pool at 1/6th g.

That's actually a very interesting idea I have never thought about? How slow would the water fall down and when splashed? Would you have to be careful not to smack the water a whole bunch least you suspend to much mist in the air to make it hard to breath for a while? What would it look like to splash around? I would love to see some cool physically based gpu renderings of what hydro stuff would look like in low g.

Quite a few of the consequences are discussed here: https://what-if.xkcd.com/124/

Lol...of course there is a xkcd for the topic... I should have known. Thanks for the great link.

Great read.

See Passengers scene where the gravity system breaks.

A local source of water would make the hotel much cheaper to run.

Imagine how much you could charge for return tickets.

sounds like the plot to the next great american western film

I doubt it. It lacks atmosphere.

I went on a vacation to Bora Bora once and upon seeing restaurant prices of $40 per person I walked two miles to the grocery store, bought a pack of hot dogs for $15 and boiled them in the coffee pot. I am not sure what food would cost on the moon, but I would definitely bring hot dogs.

I am technically considered wealthy (3% or higher). But definitely clip coupons and save money where I can.

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