Hacker News Reader

Comment by excalibur | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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).

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com