A new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon's surface, and multiple professors in the Space Resource Program at Colorado School of Mines were interviewed about the findings by national news outlets.
Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources , discussed the findings with Business Insider. From the article:
Ice deposits directly at the lunar surface are just interesting to scientists. They make for compelling spots for companies to looking into mining.
"There's a need to know if there's ice on the surface in order to extract it," Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines, told Business Insider. "This is one more step closer to prospecting the moon and showing how accessible its ice is."
George Sowers, professor of practice in the space resources program, was also interviewed by The Verge about what mining water on the Moon could mean for space exploration. From the article:
Getting anything into space is expensive. If you want your satellite to break free of Earth's gravity, you need a lot of propellant to fuel the ride to orbit. In fact, most of the weight of a rocket at launch is just the propellant needed to get the thing into space. And the deeper into space you want to go, the more propellant you need. Greater energy is needed to get farther and farther away from the planet's pull. So missions into deeper space become even more costly to pay for all the extra propellant needed to get there and the bigger rocket to house that propellant.
But what if instead of taking all the propellant you need with you from Earth, you refill your gas tank with propellant that's already in space? Then, deep-space missions become more like cross-country road trips. "Just imagine if you had to drive out to Denver and there were no gas stations along the way and you had to bring all your gas with you from New York," George Sowers, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines and former vice president at the United Launch Alliance, tells The Verge. "You probably couldn't do it in your car. You would have to tow all the fuel you need." That's why the idea of lunar mining is so enticing. Water from the Moon could be mined, broken apart into rocket fuel, and transported to a propellant depot either near the Moon or in low Earth orbit. Then, rockets wouldn't have to be so big to house all their propellant. They could simply dock with a depot and refuel for longer trips to space.