NASA discovers 'significant' amount of water on moon

[irishmick79]

Breaking headline on CNN.com

Pretty cool stuff. Could we actually be able to put a space station up there?

[Pelranius]

I just wish that they would say how much water.

[Sarevok]

Not bad. Except to make use of it you need a lot of space launches to the moon. Nothing to get excited about in the short term since even a simple moon landing again probably wont happen sooner than 2020 at at earliest.

[Gilthan]

I just wish that they would say how much water.

While the following web page is out of date, they were estimating a few billion tons total ice at the lunar pole:

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/ice/ice_moon.html

The other thread's article included a quote that the amount of water found by the projectile impact was "enough to fill about a dozen 2-gallon (7.6-liter) buckets." Assuming that's the amount distributed among the tons of dirt thrown up by the projectile impact, that's a low concentration by earth standards but unprecedented by lunar standards, since the Moon at the Apollo landing sites was literally more dry than concrete.

So there's probably enough trace lunar ice in polar craters to supply millions of tons of water over time, more than enough for any near-term lunar bases. Near earth objects like old comets with trillions of tons of ice are a still greater resource in the long term, and then there is near-infinite ice in the outer solar system.