It's Official: Water Found on the Moon

Previously there has been evidence of Hydrogen at certain locations on the Moon, though the evidence did not rule out the possibility that it was bound up in rocks as hydrate minerals. Concrete is perhaps the most widely known hydrate, few would regard concrete as a ready source of H2O even though it may be as much as 1/4 water by weight. Other evidence has pointed to actual water ice but not conclusively. This recent paper puts forward unambiguous evidence that there is actual water ice on the surface of the Moon.

That's significant because water ice is an extremely useful resource in colonization of the Solar System. It can be harvested for potable water, of course, but it can also be cracked into Oxygen and Hydrogen, for breathing and use as a rocket fuel.

That last is extremely important because of the rocket equation. The amount of propellant (fueled mass / empty mass) you need to accelerate a rocket to a specific velocity (delta V) scales exponentially with the ratio of that velocity to the rocket's exhaust velocity. Staging lets you stretch this harsh restriction by throwing away parts of your vehicle so that you can clean the slate and get to a better mass ratio for the next stage. But staging is still exponentially costly, just more efficiently so.

Now, if you look at the very end point of a trip to the Moon and back you have a vehicle launching from the lunar surface and then (the same or another vehicle) transferring to a return trajectory to Earth. These maneuvers take a sizable amount of propellant (especially launching from the surface). The weight of that propellant needs to be gently landed on the surface of the Moon, which costs extra propellant. Further, the return propellant plus its corresponding proportion of the landing propellant needs to be boosted from Earth orbit to the Moon, which costs further propellant. Etc, etc, all the way down to the launch vehicle(s) on Earth. As you see, the return propellant imposes an escalating parasitic cost throughout the whole trip. If, instead of the above, you were able to pilot a mostly empty vehicle to the Moon's surface where it would fuel up with Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen manufactured by mining and processing lunar water ice then you would be able to cut out that whole huge chunk of extra weight and propellant needed to get to the Moon and back.

Which means, you could travel to the Moon and back with much lower Earth bound mission mass, which means you can use smaller launch vehicles, which means you can get to the Moon cheaper and easier.

Not to mention, of course, that supplies of water make maintaining a mostly self-sufficient lunar base much, much easier.

Yeah, but the factory probably isn't doing it just for the water. It's primary purpose will probably be He3 extraction, with water as an incidental-but-very-important sideline. Perhaps other valuable things too.

moonwater.com and moonjuice.com already taken.

The article said there were molecules on the surface. (Either from meteors or hydrogen from the solar wind making hydroxyl (check wikipedia) and/or water with oxygen from rocks.) Quite a lot more than ever expected.

This is good, a moon colony might even be self sufficient in water.

(You have to wonder what other weird, really reactive radicals are on the surface from the solar wind? It will be fun to check for erosion on the equipment left by the moon landings. Any real chemists around? :-) This might be a future problem.)

Edit: The information asked for is in the article, btw. After the heading "Where the water comes from". :-)

Edit: A bit of syntax.

Rebuttals here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801969

Yeah, according to Nostradamus, the Knights Templar and the Free Masons have joined forces with ancient Mayan spirits to put a telekinetic shield around the moon. Now if you spell all the nouns in the previous sentence backwards, add the EBCIDIC values of their consonants, then subtract 666 from the result, you will get the names of all the gays, gypsies and jews who collaborated in Roswell to kill JFK and 2 Pac, man.

Even the biggest skeptic I'd think would find it hard to still believe that the moon landings could be fake.