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NASA Explores the Moon's Water/Oxygen Deposits
destinyland writes "NASA's LCross mission will now test whether the moon's hydrogen and oxygen deposits could be converted into air, water, and even fuel. A dramatic crash by the rocket's upper stage will blast 200 tons of moon rock up 10 kilometers from a dark crater — where its constitution can be measured by LCross's instruments. (NASA predicts 'a number of different ways that we'll be able to create water from whatever form of lunar hydrogen we find' on the moon, noting recent missions have already confirmed the presence of oxygen in moon rocks, while the sun delivers a constant stream of hydrogen.) Carrying water to the moon costs $100,000 a kilogram, so these experiments could be a crucial step to getting more people on the moon."
The mission has a blog (with feed) where they reported an anomaly two days ago.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
LCROSS had some issues last weekend which caused it to lose a good portion of its fuel. The mission is down to the wire and may not make it. If it does, it will be because of the skill and dedication of the NASA team.
The data they collect from the impact, from LRO, earth and space telescopes and LCROSS itself, will provide the missing piece of the puzzle for Lunar ISRU. Up until now, the promise of ice on the Moon has been a distant "yeah, we'll do that one day" proposition, but with this data NASA will finally be able to do study on what kinda of equipment will be required to process the ice and produce potable water, oxygen and rocket fuel (most likely methane) and that will drive the design of Lunar exploration systems.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Given that feathers are much less dense than water, everything else being equal it would cost more to get the feathers there since they enclosure required to contain them would be larger than the enclosure required to contain water.
Things not being equal, feathers are far more compressible than water so you could perhaps increase their density substantially.
You don't specify what condition you want the feathers in. It might be possible to just glue them to the outside of the craft, in which case there are no associated container requirements whereas the water must still be contained. In this case it's going to cost more to get the water there.
On the other hand, if the water was already in orbit it would be as ice, in which case you might be able to just glue a chunk of that to the outside of the craft.
If we're gluing random chunks of stuff to the outside of spaceships, it's probably going to come down to how much friction each material causes and what loss of material each substance would undergo due to space friction.
HTH