NASA Strikes Gold and Water On the Moon

tcd004 writes "The PBS NewsHour reports: there is water on the moon — along with a long list of other compounds, including mercury, gold and silver. That's according to a more detailed analysis of the cold lunar soil near the moon's South Pole. The results were released as six papers by a large team of scientists in the journal, Science Thursday. [Note: Nature's papers are behind a paywall; for a few more details, reader coondoggie points out a a story at Network World.] The data comes from the October 2009 mission, when NASA slammed a booster rocket traveling nearly 6,000 miles per hour into the moon and blasted out a hole. Trailing close behind it was a second spacecraft, rigged with a spectrometer to study the lunar plume released by the blast. The mission is called LCROSS, for Lunar Crater Observer and Sensing Satellite."

Comments

Respurces on the moon?

[Rod Beauvex]

Water? Gold? Silver? Why have we not brought democracy to the moon yet?

Re:Respurces on the moon?

[Faluzeer]

That only happens when they discover oil...

Re:elements

[CAIMLAS]

You're not getting gold off the moon unless you have heavy industry on the Moon, and putting that sort of investment there would be a monumentally stupefying waste when there are trillions of other things we can invest in down here on the surface and get much better returns much sooner.

True - but long-term, it's quite fascinating. It means there are at least some of the requisite resources on the moon for us to colonize it - for any number of definitions of "colony".

At the very least, there's water - a big cost for short-term missions. If there's water and "soil", you can create a cultivatable environment (if on a small scale). Get a small nuclear reactor up there and autonomous building drones (battery/nuclear powered, of course), and you've got an "unlimited" supply of water and hydrogen which could be used as a longer-term fuel source.

Such developments would almost immediately improve things here on earth, too: if you've got a portable, small ore refinery for moon use, you can use it for terrestrial industry, too (for those small-return, hard-to-reach locations).

Before long, you'd have enough materials and/or infrastructure on the moon that you could consider a permanent human settlement. This could be used for a number of things:

* Increased industrialization. With a little more research, we'd be able to package up the results and space-drop them to Earth.
* Increased research opportunities in low-gravity environments (good for long-term space development)
* A permanent low-gravity base from which spaceships could be more easily and potentially more cheaply built and launched. A 'space elevator' from the moon to a nearby colony vessel, for instance, would have significantly fewer requirements than one from Earth (strength and distance due to gravity well strength and size).
* Deep space telescopes (because building a large 'permanent' telescope in a gravity well would be easier than doing so in space/for space, as would its maintenance).

You minimize it, but "small" monumental jumps have had a very big impact, historically.
* Winged flight? Who needs it when we've got rail!
* Motor cars? What silly contraptions!
* Trains, for passengers? Ridiculous, nobody needs to go that fast!
* Go to the moon? What benefit is that? (Electronics industry revolution)

Also, imagine the opportunity for jump-starting another technological revolution. Due to the nature of space, this one, would, I suspect, be largely focused on 'reduce, reuse, recycle' as a core basis of functionality, not a dogma). Imagine: a small portable device which could take any waste petrol (eg. a processed food wrapper, or a great many of them) and turn it into a new, useful item. We're probably pretty close to being able to do that today, just not at an economy of scale. If there were a marketing push or something similar (say, the novelty brought on by 'astronauts are doing it'), such a thing - or something similar - could catch on.

Additionally, change in venue or requirements has often resulted in some interesting/novel/revolutionary improvements:
* Westerners improved their garments by observing the natives.
* New breeds of cattle were developed for use out West
* Canned goods were essentially 'invented' for Napoleon's large armies
* Larger, faster, more stable ships were invented to deal with the increased requirements of increased trans-Atlantic transit.

Just think how many 'common day' things we use today, on a daily basis, because someone decided the tool they were using did not work well within their specific constraints (but ended up being broadly applicable elsewhere, too):
* carbiner clips
* multitools/swiss army knives
* PDAs (and now, smartphones)
* post-it notes

I'm sure you can think of more. Those are the opportunities that further space exploration present.

I'm sure that, if there is a financial interest in doing so, someone will figure out how to get to the moon and stay there on a semi-permanent basis - if there's a financial case for doing so.