Researchers from the Center for Space Resources at Colorado School of Mines were recently featured in a Space.com article about mining the moon for water ice. Mines hosted the 9th joint meeting of the Space Resources Roundtable (SRR) and the Planetary & Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium (PTMSS) last month.
Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources, and graduate student Hunter Williams were quoted in the article.
From the article:
"We're at the tipping point of a new era in space commerce, where private industry, NASA and international collaborators are joining together to realize the dream of launching humanity into the solar system," said Hunter Williams, a Colorado School of Mines researcher. "There has never been a more exciting time for furthering science, turning a profit or promoting international cooperation than right now."
Williams, along with Chris Dreyer and George Sowers, also of the School of Mines, detailed a low-cost mission to discover the extent of water resources on the moon, as well as a newly developed extraction technique, "thermal mining," that transforms lunar water ice into rocket fuel.