If this is really the case, it's a pretty big deal. While water is important in keeping humans alive, one big near term application is propellant. Being able to

If this is really the case, it's a pretty big deal. While water is important in keeping humans alive, one big near term application is propellant. Being able to make H2-O2 propellant on the Moon could reduce the costs of lunar return missions. There is also something of a business opportunity in using propellant mined on the Moon to refuel satellites in Earth orbit. The delta V cost from Moon-GEO(or pretty much any other orbit) is lower than the cost of Earth to GEO. So if one can get the infrastructure set up it makes sense. But water is useful for other things too. Just having access to hydrogen on the Moon lets us do so many things. This makes it easier to do a number of extractive processes, we can use hydrogen to reduce metals in lunar soil[5], make acids like HCl and H2SO4, make silicone for seals, purify silicon for solar cells and electronics. Of course, we already know the Moon has water, the problem is this water is located in permanently shadowed craters. It's hard to get power in a crater that's permanently in the dark. In addition, aside from crashing a spacecraft into one[0], we haven't explored these craters and don't know what the environment is like. But this new discovery implies that certain surface regions of the Moon could have quite a bit of water. Sure, the water may not be as concentrated as in permanently shadowed regions, but we can get power easier and we understand the lunar surface environment better. Not only that, if the water is in the form we expect, then we have ground truths from the apollo missions from which we can start developing extraction processes[1]. The TRL for robots capable of operating on the lunar surface is relatively high[2][3]. Using specs from top performing team for NASA's lunar robotic mining challenge[] and the estimated concentration of water in regolith, it is reasonable to assume that a rover about the size of China's Chang'e rover could potentially mine enough regolith in about ~75 days to obtain enough water to equal its landed mass(assuming 100% extraction from regolith). Of course the problem is that the water is locked up in glass. We need to grind or melt the glass up to get the water out. Grinding has the potential to be more energy efficient, but I suspect we won't be able to extract very much and melting glass uses quite a bit of energy. We might be able to reduce the amount of energy by using a molten salt flux to reduce the melting temperature. Of course, another option is to be smarter about how we use the energy we put into melting glass. We can recapture the heat and run a stirling engine for electrical power. It would be even smarter to put the spent glass itself to use since we have to melt glass anyway, we might as well form it into something useful. We might use the spent glass to make bricks for landing pads, roads, and other structures [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS [1]http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2015/12/24/the-last-great-discovery-of-apollo-lunar-volcanic-glass/ http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2015/12/24/the-last-... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_program [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutu_(rover) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutu_(rover) [4]http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20120013082 http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20120013082 [5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_3 [6]http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/ResourcesNearEarthSpace/resources04.pdf http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/ResourcesNearEarthS...