The important note in that article: “According to NASA, the ice would have to be relatively pure ice and at least several feet thick to give this signature.”
This would be cool as it makes the water usable by manned missions, unlike the last discovery where it was in minute amounts. Not sure the quotation above is true or just exaggerated by the Wired reporter.
Two important uses of setting up a base on the moon are (1) testing hardware for Mars, especially rovers and dust protection suits etc. (2) setting up a large array of radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon which is shielded from Earth transmissions. Because of moon’s low gravity that telescope can be periodically serviced by manned missions (just like the way Hubble has been serviced) that could be based on the polar region where there is water.
I hope that Obama removes the fog soon and declares that the Moon is going to be the testing location. Right now there is no destination for NASA’s manned space program. I don’t like the intermediate asteroid mission that Planetary Society is lobbying for as that does not test any hardware needed for Mars, not to mention being an even less interesting destination than the Moon.
Buzz Aldrin is suggesting Phobos as the intermediate mission instead of the Moon. I think Phobos would definitely serve as a good test for the orbital hardware for Mars and it should be a destination along with the Moon, which can be a good testing place for the surface Martian hardware. But they HAVE to declare Mars as the concrete goal instead of beating around the bush. Otherwise nothing will happen and the “private enterprise” such as Space-X will be left with low-earth-orbit missions for another few years until the next president. I think this last scenario is most likely and the way we will break out of it will be when Space-X and Bigelow Aerospace use low-earth orbit revenue and experience to strike out to the Moon, 10 years from now. Together they have more than all the necessary technology (or in the process of building so) to get there.
I am predicting a race between Space-X+Bigelow group (partially funded by a sub-section of NASA after their next two efforts to build hardware directly fail, and they completely give up building or owning flight hardware by 2017) vs. ISRO vs. Chinese Space agency to the Moon around 2020.
Gunjan
