Some Questions

From: Dave Handwerk

> I've read that too. That when water ice is very very
> cold, it is stronger that steel. I think that was a
> problem with mining it in the dark craters in the
> Lunar Polar Regions (if it even exists there).

Yeah, I remember reading somebody commenting on a scientific paper on
radar analysis of the lunar polar regions which was widely reported in
the press as contradicting the notion of water ice there. But the
comment was that the paper itself did not dispute the notion of water
ice, only large continuous slabs of ice close to the surface. They
commented that fine grains of ice mixed in the soil was still not ruled
out, and went on to say that this was actually a better outcome from the
point of view of resource retrieval. Large slabs of lunar ice would be
very difficult to break up because, unlike the kind of ice we typically
encounter on Earth, this would be ice at cryogenic temperatures.

Regards,

Mike Combs