Excellent news for space enthusiasts!

I heard an interview with one of the lead scientists on the LCROSS mission, who said you can get almost a gallon of water out of a wheelbarrow-full of lunar dirt, at least where LCROSS struck. That’s ridiculously rich, especially compared to what we expected to find, and it will give humanity’s space programs a much-needed boost once we get that far. Literally — the water there, with solar or nuclear energy, will be turned into rocket fuel for jaunts further afield, as well as breathable air.

Why? If scientific curiosity isn’t a good enough reason for you, consider the natural resources it will make available. The asteroid belt alone contains the raw materials for an entire rocky planet that never formed, and you barely have to dig for them. Knock a couple big metallic chunks into Earth orbit every few decades, and you’ve got a ready-made and endless source of just about any heavier element you want, available for building larger spacecraft (with no extra cost for lifting it out of a gravity well!) or for shipment down to us. And once the problems with the skyhook idea are worked out, shipping it down to us would generate enough power to lift essentially anything else we want to into orbit — including us — and potentially more.

(Peter F. Hamilton’s very interesting Mindstar trilogy depicts a potential near-future that includes this sort of thing, all developed in maybe thirty or forty years. I think that speed is accurate, if we have the will to do it.)