76 kilograms per ton (1000 kilograms) indicates the regolith is 7.6% water to begin with. We know from (admittedly low resolution) neutron spectroscopy measurements that the poles of the moon are about 20 times drier than that. The sunlit regions where most of the ilmenite is located is even drier than that.

Maybe there is a spot on the moon where there is that much water, but we would need much MUCH better water prospecting missions to find it. And the only thing even close to a prospecting mission (VIPER) just got cancelled.

This is *not* huge news. Water has to be available in extractible quantity to be extracted and used. I like to point out that there is gold dissolved in seawater but nobody is getting rich mining gold from the oceans because the gold is so diffuse that extracting it makes no financial sense. This paper goes out of its way to *not* announce what the percentage of water by weight was in the sample (it does say that the mineral has 41% water by weight, but it does not say how much mineral is in the sample).

Analyses vary, but in the ISRU (Insitu resource utilization) field is is generally thought that there needs to be 2% water by weight in regolith before it is worth extracting (note, Sahara sand is about 2% water by weight). Regolith on the sunlight moon is typically at least 10 if not 100 times dryer than this.

There certainly *could* be extractable water on the moon, but this paper does not demonstrate that. Finding a few water molecules is scientifically interesting, but not economically interesting.

Source: I study ISRU professionally. AMA maybe?

A NIAC phase two award is 600 thousands dollars, over two years. That *might* be enough money to pay one person full time for those two years. (Not that scientists make 300K per year, but after overhead and benefits, etc... That is about what one costs). So they say "NASAs plan to build". That is patently untrue. There is no plan to build anything. They are funding like one person for two years to think about the concept and do some calculations. That is a tiny amount of research funding. Which is the point of NIAC. Low dollars for low probability but high impact.

I was thinking the math didn't work out. Boy was I wrong. 63 kilograms (liters) of water. Heat capacity of water is about 4.1 kilojoules per kilogram per degree. You only need to heat that water 14 degrees K to get to 3.5 megajoules. Do that every second and you have 3.5 mega watts. Damn. Water is amazing.

I am at this very moment sitting in at Space Resources Roundtable. The biggest conference on space resources in the US, and possibly the world. Not a peep from these people at this conference. I've seen a dozen or more talks on collecting energy and splitting water and regolith with various techniques. This stuff already works, and it all uses industrial processes we understand. So my question is, why would you even do this? There appears to be no advantage to making big artificial leaves over just making big photovoltaic panels and splitting these chemicals the old fashioned way.

Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL, builders of DART, Parker Solar Probe, New Horizons, etc.... and the only non-NASA center that builds planetary probes) proposed to do a Venus SAR mission several times over a decade ago. With none other than Keith Raney (Chief of Magellan) leading the proposal. NASA declined every time, favoring to to it in house at JPL instead. If they had given the mission to APL, it would already be there taking data. Am I biased? Yes. Does APL have a record of doing it on time and on budget, yes.

I work off-world construction and in-situ resource utilization for NASA's Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium. We know almost nothing about living on another planet. We've only done it for two days at a time. If you dismiss this as easy, or think that Starships large cargo capacity will somehow magically solve the problem, I need you to check your Dunning-Krueger. We've learned a lot about closed loop air handling on the ISS, but how to we build buildings, how to grow food, how to mine, how to power, how to handle thermal, how to make sure everything is modular and replaceable? How to make spares, how to have robots assist under multiple second, much rather multiple minute time scales... These are all open problems. TRL 2-3 in the industry parlance. Every single one of those things is solvable. And most are being worked on at the 100K$ or 1M$ a year kind of level. It is going to take years and Billions of investments to get them actually ready to go. Building a reusable rocket in the year 2000 was also "solvable". It just took decades and millions to perfect. Yes, MOXIE is cool, but we are not sure it is scalable. I 100% money back guarantee that the act of putting cargo on the moon or Mars is the *easy* part. By a lot. A permanent presence on the Moon or on Mars requires this surface hardware. Anything mpast flags and footprints won't happen until well after you see either NASA or industry putting BIG dollars into it. And nobody is doing this. There is no secret Mars ISRU lab in SpaceXs basement. NASA is working it, but low levels and slowly. Blue Origin may be working it (they just made a lot of strategic hires). Want to help? Join us: https://lsic.jhuapl.edu/

Caves are good radiation shielding, and for some temperature control, but thermal engineering on the moon is trickier than you might think, and there are lots of reasons you might not want to be in a cave. Plus, caves tend to be in Mare, and the poles are highlands material, which is thought to have little to no lava caves. The reason to go to the poles is not just the water. We know astonishingly little about the location, state, or how to mine that water anyway. The reason to go to the poles on the moon is that you can be in sunlight for months at a time, instead of the 14 day day/night cycle everywhere else on the moon. NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate in actively working these problems. https://lsic.jhuapl.edu/ if you are interested in joining, or in more info.

We pick them up in Antarctica all the time. Yes, samples with context would be more scientifically useful, but we are talking multiple missions at multiple billions of dollars each. Not a good use of very thinly spread planetary exploration. Johns Hopkins went to Pluto for ~300M$. We could easily dedicate a mission to every planet in the solar system, maybe twice over, for what those rocks are going to cost us. P.S. China recently announced they are going to return Mars samples two years earlier than NASA was planning to. One has to wonder if this switchup might be an attempt to beat China.

Look, I get it. This is very cool. And I love thinking about future space missions, and I also actually get that this is the sort of thing NIAC funding is for. My problem here is that the Aerospace Corporation has a congressional line. They are required to keep core competencies in certain technical fields and advise NRO, NGA, etc... What they are NOT paid by Congress to do is SETI.

So a complicated bit of code that is stochastic by nature returns an unexplainable result. Two options. 1) We don't understand what the damn thing is doing. 2) NeW pHySiCS!!!!!! Rage Against The Machine Learning.

How does buying Twitter help make life interplanetary? Or help the transition from fossil fuels? Because for $47B, one could do a lot of good on either of those fronts.

Man in charge of ensuring nuclear power plants never get built says nuclear power plants never get build.

Says JPL, while landing their 99th rover on Mars. Seriously. At this point, do they build those things Henry Ford style? Where is the innovation? Where is the daring?

Democrats subsidize the companies they want to see succeed and are up front about putting their finger on the scale of the free market. Republicans love subsidies as much or more, but want to protest they are all about the invisible hand.