NASA should be forbidden from doing anything with it except conducting tests. Since when did we become a socialist country with government owning economic assets?

what the next prize after the GLXP should be if it actually gets won. Sample return? ISRU?

ISRU simulations on earth are easier than even GLXP and can and should be done today. For example, give a $1 million prize for somebody to start with a 100 kg block of water ice, process it into a block of propellant, and launch. The propellant can be anything the contestant wants as long as it originated from the ice. (e.g. it could be a thermal water “steam” rocket, a thermal hydrogen rocket discarding the O2, an LH/LOX rocket, etc.). All propellants not derived from the ice are forbidden. The clock starts when they start processing the block of ice. The first team to process the propellant, fuel their rocket, to launch it to, say, 1 km after the clock starts ticking wins the prize. So it’s basically a race to produce rocket propellant and then fuel and launch a decent rocket.

Alternatively, one could run a rocket race (whatever happened to the Rocket Racing League?) where the rules are that the contestants must make all the propellant they use from water.

(As we better characterize the contents of actual lunar ice — e.g. does it contain methane? hydrogen peroxide? etc. the contest can be modified and rerun with improved ice simulant instead of pure water).

We could have an ice harvesting robot contest, where contestants have small robots (100 kg weight limit) traverse muddy stretch of glaciers to extract and purify the ice (by whatever means the contestants like, but all energy production and machinery is part of that 100 kg budget). Whoever produces the most 99% pure water out of the frozen mud in the space of two hours wins.

With a higher budget of $10 million, spend $5 million to build a lunar polar crater environmental simulator, then offer a $5 million prize to the machine that can extract and clean the most ice inside that simulator. Another idea along these lines — the Unviersity Washington has a Mars atmosphere simulator. The prize could be awarded to whoever makes the most rocket propellant from the simulated Martian atmosphere. Part of the fund goes to renting (and if necessary improving) the simulator for running the contest and part goes towards the prize.

That was not Paul Spudis who wrote that.

Does it matter if the radiation was GCRs rather than (direct) solar photons or solar wind?

The last thing needed now is a call for lunar property rights. Mining firms made that mistake in the 1960’s by trying to claim portions of the sea floor. The resulting Law of the Sea Conferences killed deep ocean mining.

The legal regime that is in place for lunar resources at the moment, if you pick it up its yours, is well suited to lunar industrial development. More restrictive laws should wait until a future “Lunar Republic” declares independence and creates its own laws for land ownership.