The Apollo missions may not have found evidence of water ice, but they did find trace water within in the samples collected. However, since the lunar dust made sealing the collection boxes difficult, the evidence of water was dismissed as a contaminant picked-up as the samples were transported back from the moon.

"'There have been studies that have shown you can reduce the mass of a mission to Mars by a factor of somewhere between three and five if you get propellants from the space environment rather than launching them all from Earth,' Metzger said."

Editors, this statement is false. Good reporting will correct erroneous assertions from subject-matter experts.

The mass of a mission to Mars won't be affected by where the propellants come from. What will be affected is the lift mass coming out of Earth's gravity well.

The project is a good one, but it's just a baby step. An excavator/prospector robot won't be capable of turning water ice into fuel packages and launching them to LEO or a LaGrange point.

There's a *lot* more engineering ahead.

Which team from Google Lunar X Prize is scheduled to launch first?

This old article from Feb 2011
http://www.thereg...signing/

talks about Astrobotic having plans to launch from Florida late in 2013.

And do you know if each team has to pay for the launch to the Moon? If so, they have to have means to invest pretty heavily for such a launch before they can scoop the $15 or $30 million prize.

All of these efforts intend to use robotic explorers instead of humans, because robots are cheaper, safer, and less complicated. These same arguments are even more valid for exploration to Mars and the Asteroid Belt. Since robots don't require large amounts of water and oxygen, it probably isn't necessary to obtain Lunar Water in the first place.

Will the design shown in the image even work? From what I gather the water is trapped in parts of craters which are permanently in shadows. So photovoltaics won't power that thing. Or are they trying to power this via indirect sunlight?

@antialias. Good point. I hope they've thought this through. I'm not sure what you mean by "indirect sunlight". Perhaps there would be a second robot at the top of the crater, who would hold a mirror and reflect sunlight to the robot explorer in the crater?

what you mean by "indirect sunlight"

The parts of the monnscape that are in direct sunlight are quite bright (judging from looking out my window at the Moon). So I would suspect that there is some 'second hand light' that would illuminate parts of the shadow (if all else fails there is still 'Earth-shine'). But I suspect the amount of energy one can get off that is significantly smaller than from panels pointed directly at the sun.

Will the design shown in the image even work? From what I gather the water is trapped in parts of craters which are permanently in shadows. So photovoltaics won't power that thing.

They have batteries. They will take short drives down into shallow craters, drill for samples, then go back to the sunlight for charging. It's only supposed to be a 10 day mission, unless it survives the 14 day lunar night, then it could be extended.

Think about how long you can run an electric golf cart between charging, and you get the idea. They just need to make sure they reserve enough power to get back into the light, and hope they don't get stuck.

I'm fairly confident that if anyone can get them to the moon, SpaceX is a good choice.

"'There have been studies that have shown you can reduce the mass of a mission to Mars by a factor of somewhere between three and five if you get propellants from the space environment rather than launching them all from Earth,' Metzger said."

Editors, this statement is false. Good reporting will correct erroneous assertions from subject-matter experts.

The mass of a mission to Mars won't be affected by where the propellants come from. What will be affected is the lift mass coming out of Earth's gravity well.

Depends on how you define mission mass. I'd interpret it to mean Gross Lift Off Weight (GLOW) from earth's surface.

If you want to include all the propellant used in the mission mass, a propellant source in space could make quite a difference. For a given payload, a 15 km/s delta v budget takes more propellant than a 9 km/s delta V budget plus a 6 km/s delta V budget.

Depends on how you define mission mass. I'd interpret it to mean Gross Lift Off Weight (GLOW) from earth's surface

Depends on the mission too. If you want to do a return trip back from the moon, then having fuel on the moon means you don't have to take any of the return trip fuel to the moon. That's a huge savings.

Same goes for trips back and forth to Mars. If you can make fuel from Mars' ice caps, that's a huge savings. Every bit of fuel you don't take with you on the trip there allows you to make your fuel tanks smaller, etc. In the case of Mars, it might even be a make or break case, since it is excessively difficult to land anything heavy on Mars. Trying to land with the fuel you need to take back off again might not be possible with our current technology. Making fuel there MIGHT make a two way trip possible.

A brave new world where capitalists fund these ventures and not the people
Why the obsession with going down another gravity well? Is this some fetish? The gravity well on the moon is bad enough, but Mars?
Let me help. Getting out of a gravity well is a very expensive exercise. Popping in and out of them smacks of self-indulgence.
Use the delta v to go to low mass objects and use the material to build a habitat for your fellow man to escape the inevitable consequences of his exponential overshoot.
Sure it might be uncomfortable in the begining. It will even be lethal.
But consider the alternative. We are headed for 6C warming. We have made this orb uninhabitable. Time to go. UP