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Japan's moon probe landed upside-down but somehow it still works (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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nations flock to the cratered south pole and far side of the moon, where critical resources such as water could be mined.

Is capitalism so prevalent, we're running out of ocean already?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

There's a section of the book "A City on Mars" which covers the water we know about so far on the moon. In short, it's absolutely desirable, however there is not very much water in absolute terms, so we're looking at a gold rush type situation with the potential to exhaust what's there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

a gold rush type situation with the potential to exhaust what’s there.

The older I get the more I think that this is humanity's (sole) core competency. sigh

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, exhausting resources on the moon is a valid concern, it could be an invaluable, even necessarily asset to furth space exploration, but should probably be viewed as a stepping stone to something more sustainable, possibly asteroid mining, capturing comets etc.

I certainly glossed over that in my comment because it was already getting longer than I liked and I kind of wanted to focus on just the cost of getting things into space, but it is something that needs to be managed carefully or we lose an important foothold we might need to take the next steps.

I'm certainly no rocket scientist or astrophysicist so exact details are a bit over my head, and to be clear I'm talking about long term goals that are decades if not centuries out, but I'd kind of imagine that the ideal situation would be something like using the moon to get enough fuel to go mine a few comets and then use the ice from those comets to support future missions instead of getting it all from the moon.