Space.com: NASA has long planned to mine water on the Moon to
supply human colonies and future space exploration. Now the
discovery of small amounts of water across much of the lunar
surface has shifted that vision into fast-forward, with the US
space agency pursuing several promising technologies. A hydrogen
reduction plant and lunar rover prospectors have already passed
field tests on Hawaii’s volcanic soil, and more radical
microwave technology is being evaluated. “You can make back
costs fairly quickly [within a year] compared to the launch
costs of just throwing tanks of water and oxygen at the moon,”
said Gerald Sanders, manager of NASA’s InSitu Resource
Utilization Project. Still, Sanders cautioned that there are big
unknowns—how much water the Moon holds, where it is, and how
deep will they have to excavate to get to it. Nature News: An
independent report has all but ruled out radioactive
contamination from the experiments of physicist Ernest
Rutherford as the source of a cluster of deaths at the Univ