Monday October 19, 2009, 1:53 am
You cannot squeeze water out of a rock. this is a futile excercise.. sherbet if they cannot get things right here, how much more will they not get it right in another planet

Monday October 19, 2009, 6:16 am
Actually, you can get water out of rocks. It is called waters of hydration. With solar furnaces on the moon, water could be extracted pretty easily. The moon is just where it needs to be to help us get out of the cradle of earth and move most of the damaging industries of earth off of the earth and do things like ore smelting by launching ore into a cometory orbit of the sun using a solar powered rail gun. What returns is smelted, molten ore ready to be syphoned off and used as raw materials for industry without dirtying up the Earth. One big advantage of the moon is that it does not have an atmosphere. No cloudy days on the Moon, just long days and long nights. With no atmosphere, a catapult like a rail gun may be all that is needed to launch materials and products off of the moon for smelting and delivery (anywhere on earth or a L-point (Lagrange Point)).

Monday October 19, 2009, 1:11 pm
Good points, Robert R. Best known hydrates are crystalline solids that lose their fundamental structures upon removal of the bound water; examples of hydrates are: Glauber's salt (sodium sulfate decahydrate), washing soda (sodium carbonate decahydrate), borax (sodium tetraborate decahydrate), and blue vitriol (copper sulfate pentahydrate. Finding water on the Moon won't come cheap. Perpaps all the money that will take should go to halting world famine.

Thursday October 22, 2009, 12:38 am
According to several lunar spacecraft probes, there is substantial water ice locked in the lunar soil, probably deposited there by comets. But it's going to take some doing to extract it for practical uses.