This discovery of so much more water ice on the moon than previously thought is such a boon for ISRU and future moon habitats and industry if we ever get around

This discovery of so much more water ice on the moon than previously thought is such a boon for ISRU and future moon habitats and industry if we ever get around to continuing the space race. We could crack lots of cryo propellant, and far more easily than the old plans. The moon could become a huge propellant, fuel, structural materials and life-support depot with a very easy gravity well to get out of--way easier than Earth. That makes it very important for future Mars missions as well. It's easier to stop off at the moon for a bit than to go straight to Mars from Earth. Regolith has all kinds of neat stuff in it, such as aluminum and that legendary helium-3 which may or may not be a miracle fuel if fusion ever breaks even (and we figure out how to do it with aneutronic fuels, which is way harder). The aluminum can be made into solid rockets, which are good enough to get off the moon but damn near useless for anything else because of their pathetic specific impulse. But it would be a great way to get this water off the moon without having to waste much on shipping. If we set up nuclear furnaces we could crack some of the minerals to get oxygen, but it would be so energy-intensive compared to melting ice, and hydrogen is super rare on worlds with easy gravity wells. Hydrogen likes to sublimate off into space and there's practically none anywhere this late in the game. That would be a big bottleneck on ISRU. But all this water ice hidden away near the surface really changes things. Now if we'd only get serious and go nuclear and get people back in space. Check out the always incredible Atomic Rockets by Winchell Chung for great spacecraft diagrams, mission profiles, pdfs of charts and graphs and nomograms and more. It's a treasure trove for space nerds who wish NASA went the way we thought it was going to go in the fifties and sixties. http://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/ http://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/