Water On The Moon!

by Ebon Sat Nov 14, 2009 11:04 am

Hey guys,
You remember we smashed a giant tin can into the moon last month? And NASA was testing to see if they could find water in it? Well, they did... 24 GALLONS of water in an area roughly the size of a football field (American football, not soccer).

This is a BFD, a Big Fucking Deal. And if you don't know why, let me explain. First off, water shipped up to the moon is worth more than the same amount of gold. It's phonomenally expensive to ship water up there but if there is water on the moon and it's as pentiful as it seems to be, we can use condensers and recyclers to supply a small permanent human presence. So they have drinking water but how do they breathe? Water is made up of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Now, there's plenty of oxygen on the moon but it's bound up in minerals like silicon and aluminium. The hydrogen from the water allows us to free that, creating air or something very similar. Power's simple, the lack of cloud cover means that solar power is far more efficient.

Water changes everything. There's not enough to create an atmosphere (ala Total Recall) but there is enough to make a small permanent human presence on the moon a viable possibility. And once that's set up, further exploration becomes far easier. The most energy intensive part of a space shot is escaping Earth's gravity. While the moon has a gravity field, it's a far weaker one so launching craft from the moon is much less energy intensive. Perhaps enough to make it viable to mine the mineral goldmine in the asteroid belt.

Apparently, President Obama is considering cutting NASA's budget (which is probably what inspired this game of galactic darts in the first place). No, no! Exactly the wrong direction! Pull out of both wars, pump all the money into the NASA budget. By 2015, we could have a shuttle going up every six months, taking supplies and staff to a moonbase and bringing back shipments of minerals mined from the asteroid belt.