An interesting essay. I’m working with several people to pursue LASSO. It’s primarily a tech demo for low-altitude lunar orbit, but if it works, we could get a good map of the resource.
8 thoughts on “Lunar Water”
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An interesting essay. I’m working with several people to pursue LASSO. It’s primarily a tech demo for low-altitude lunar orbit, but if it works, we could get a good map of the resource.
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“1.1 Why has water been called “the oil of space”?”
May that we get off the Moon and go where the oil is faster than we got off Earth.
Apparently, Titan has more hydrocarbons on its surface than Earth has total hydrocarbon reserves. Titan’s home planet, Saturn, has rings proven to contain more water ice than all of the known water on Earth. Ultimately, Saturn’s rings and Titan will become the fuel and water sources for our reshaping of the Solar system for the benefit of humanity.
Unless an EIS is required first. Then humanity is screwed.
There are fuel and water resources closer to home in the meantime. Near-Earth Asteroids for starters, then main belt, Jovian Trojans, and Callisto (outside Jupiter’s radiation belts). Callisto is about as far as we can reach with technology on the immediate horizon. I published an article about NEOs in the November 1989 Ad Astra and turned that into the Novel “Fellow Traveler” (Bantam, 1992).
Many years ago I wrote that the basic economic engine of the future inhabited Solar System would be the exchange of mass gathered from Mars and beyond for energy produced at or sunward of Earth and transmitted outward via laser or microwave beams. I’ve seen no reason since to change that view.
I also think lunar frozen volatiles and Near-Earth Objects will have an early role of some importance to play, but will play out and fade in importance over time. This is not to say that such resources won’t be quite important over the next century or two. I’ve seen no reason to change that view either.
If the Progressive Democrats ever get back in, it’s all just a fever dream.
Yes. But we have gotten them out for at least the nonce and it is now our job to see to it they never get back in. This is a job that will be made easier by several factors:
1. Their attempt at a Great Replacement has failed and is in the process of being reversed.
2. The recapture/replacement of many of the institutions through which the Left has staged its long march over the past century or so. It’s early days for this as yet, but the signs are encouraging.
3. The fact that progressives, for a variety of reasons, have a fertility rate that asymptotically approaches zero.
4. That, when out of power, the Left is autophagous. When they are prevented from “eating the rich” – but, especially, from eating everyone else too – they will fall to eating one another.
It’s not 1913 or 1933 anymore. And it never will be again.
The Left are not the wave of the future and even they seem to be slowly and torturously figuring this out.
Back when I was giving public talks on the Moon, one of the questions that popped up in my head was whether there might be a new kind of “water cycle” on the Moon.
So the folks in India took at the sensor data for the IIRC Galileo probe when it did its sensor calibration run past the Moon. What they found was faint traces of water at latitudes far more southerly than they had any reason to be given that daytime temps would volatilize any water to be swept away in the solar wind. But there they were.
What if…we were seeing the formation of new H2O, or at least hydroxyls, on the lunar surface, through some kind of interaction between the breakdown of the regolith via UV, SWIEs, and other factors? Some of that H2O may migrate to the poles via random walk and contribute to the stockpile in the everdark craters.
Which gets us to the real question that needs to be answered, by assay IMNSHO, and that is the form in which the water will be found. Will it be hoarfrost on the surface that can be scooped up, or will it be mixed into the regolith like frozen concrete? If it is like frozen concrete, what would happen if you used a parabolic mirror on top of one of the power towers up on the rim to direct raw sunlight down into your work area? Explosive vaporization of the water?
So many questions. We just need to get off our butts and start figuring out how to make the Moon useful for humanity, and the best way to do that is to go do it.
Yes. There’s no substitute for ground truth and getting that needs to be job #1 once we’re actually back on Luna again. The actual state of play where lunar frozen volatiles is concerned will critically affect even the very early steps toward settling and industrializing the Moon.