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Breaking ice

Breaking ice launch pads, manned colonies and perhaps even luxury sight-seeing tours. Yes, all this and more on the Moon - the most happening satellite ever since the us National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa) lunar probe discovered what the scientists had always expected our Moon to possess: plain, simple water. Only when you find it on a nearby satellite, do you realise that water, something which we have always taken for granted, could help open up frontiers which - so far - could be crossed provided you were a science fiction author with a pretty vivid imagination.

However, recently-found scattered water-ice on this tiny satellite is all that was needed to change the way most scientists perceived space travel.And after nasa's recent disclosure that our "heavenly" neighbour might have as much as 300 tonnes of ice hidden somewhere within its pock-marked polar region, there have been numerous speculations, some involving colonisation of the lunar surface; other wild and/or futuristic enough to give a regular Hollywood "sci-fi" blockbuster a tough run for its money.

Water on the Moon, experts agree, is enough to cater to a large lunar settlement and further exploration of space. They, however, point out one major hurdle that can capsize the futurists' dreamboat: the difficulty of extracting useful quantities of water from the Moon's surface would mean that any permanent human settlement is still decades away.

Any base on the Moon would have to use recycled water. Ice found on the Moon would be used mainly for the separation of hydrogen and oxygen which would then be used to produce rocket fuel, explains Mark Duke, staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

"This would make the operation of a lunar base more efficient," says Hermann Koelle of the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, who chairs the International Academy of Astronautics' subcommittee on lunar development. The maintenance cost for setting up and running a permanent lunar base, with fuel for round trips thrown in, could be cut by 60 per cent, he says.

However, experts are not so optimistic. Francis Rocard, Solar System mission manager at the French space agency cnes in Paris, warns that no one has thought of the start-up costs. "If you take into account all the infrastructure you have to put on the Moon to make it work, it makes it much more expensive," he says. Koelle agrees: "It takes a lot of equipment and human energy to establish a factory to produce rocket propellants."

The ice is thought to exist in the form of crystals making up less than one per cent of the top metre or so of the soil in certain perennially-shadowed craters. Although it appears that water can be harvested simply by shovelling up the lunar soil, putting it in a sealed collecting system and heating it, there is still one problem: location of the plant. A manned base is most likely to be set up in a bright and sunny region near the Moon's equator - some 3,000 km away from the ice-containing polar craters.

This scenario might change, however, if a base is built at a crater rim near the Moon's south pole called the Peak of Eternal Light. This region, just a few kilometres in diameter, is thought to be permanently illuminated. Although the temperature never crosses -30

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