I wrote a fairly lengthy post on this subject on Page F30 this morning, but since much of this has to do with the direction of the American space program we should probably be having the discussion here as well. Yesterday afternoon NASA held a press conference to announce the definitive presence of water on the Moon, and it was simply fascinating. It seems that this water is most present every morning and evening (note that morning - evening = 14 days on the Moon) on the Moon, and though it exists everywhere it is in larger quantities in higher latitudes, so away from the equator.
This water is apparently created by the interaction of ionized hydrogen particles from the solar wind and the soil on the Moon, creating both water (H20) and hydroxyl (OH). The amount of water present in the soil is about 1.2 litres per cubic metre, or one quart per cubic yard.
This is huge in its implications for the Moon vs. Mars, and even those on newmars.com are admitting that this is a real game changer in a forum post started in April that was originally devoted to trying to lobby NASA to give up on the Moon and focus on Mars instead. But with water present on the Moon that means that we can now create three things on the surface that we otherwise would have had to bring with us: water, rocket fuel (hydrogen), and air (oxygen).
You can also see either in the Page F30 post or this page and this page on Wikipedia that even before we were certain that there was this much water on the Moon we have a total of eight missions lined up over the next four missions. Mars only has five over the same period, and two of those are quite speculative. In fact, two missions to the Mars system were delayed (Mars Science Laboratory and Russia's Phobos-Grunt), and with Mars a delay means waiting about 2.5 years for the two planets to align again in order to get the chance to launch. With the Moon a delay is just a delay, and as soon as the delay is worked out there's the Moon, just three days away.
Naturally we should continue the missions around Mars and also send off the ones that are currently being constructed, so I'm not advocating cancelling anything at the moment. But long-term plans should be reviewed, and other Mars-oriented plans should be changed to those that will aid us on the Moon. One example is the (cancelled, but still) Mars Gravity Biosatellite which was to take mice up into space and bring them back safely after giving them the experience of 0.38g (Mars' gravity). Now a mission like that should be calibrated for 0.16g, since we still have no idea what living on the Moon in the long term would be like.
What about the effects of gravity in the long term on the Moon? We don't know yet. But we do know that the longest an astronaut has been in 0g has been in space for one time is 427 days, so we have a long time to find out. Plus, even though Mars' gravity is closer to that on Earth, it also necessitates a total of one year in no gravity whatsoever just to get there and back whereas the Moon once again is just three days.
I love Mars but it simply isn't the best place to explore first. The Moon is right in our backyard, and it's much much wetter than we thought.
("Wetter" in this case still means dryer than the Sahara BTW, but still wetter than we thought)
As for micrometeorites on the Moon due to its lack of an atmosphere, they certainly may be a risk but we aren't quite certain just how frequent they are. In the beginning we will need some type of shielding to make sure that our astronauts on the surface are safe. In the long term though I think it might be in our best interest to create the thinnest of thin atmospheres on the Moon. This is not terraforming the Moon, it's simply creating a tiny atmosphere perhaps similar to that of Neptune's moon Triton, which has a total of 14 microbars of pressure (1/70,000th that of the Earth). Even a thin atmosphere like that is capable of creating clouds and some interesting wind formations, and extends to 800 km above the surface. A tiny atmosphere on the Moon would reduce the risk from the smallest of micrometeorites, those that are only a few mm or cm in diameter and nearly impossible to detect. The total mass of the tiny atmosphere might weigh in at about 12 billion tons, which is two years of CO2 emissions from the United States. Not possible in the short term, but it's something that we would be able to do.
Ah, but the Moon can't hold an atmosphere? True, but that's looking at it from a geological time frame. Apparently an atmosphere on the Moon would be blown away by the solar wind in a few thousand years, which for us is an eternity.
Luckily the press conference has been uploaded to YouTube so you can see it here. What's really interesting about it is that the scientists first began to suspect this process way back in November last year, but their state of mind for the first while was that it had to be a mistake, because common wisdom up till now has been that the Moon simply doesn't have this process going on on the surface. So they went over the data, compared it with that obtained by other probes previously (Cassini and Deep Impact), and finally came to the conclusion that yes, this process is happening and it's undeniable. And the best part is that it takes place within 2 mm of the surface.
IMO the best way to begin colonization is to start from the peaks of eternal light at the south pole, where solar energy can be obtained at all times. Since water in the soil is most present in the higher latitudes it may not even be necessary to go into the permanently shadowed craters to obtain ice water there (if it exists; we'll find out soon enough thanks to LCROSS). The equator is far too dry to be of any use to us.
Oh, and that's also why the Apollo astronauts brought back such dry rocks. They had a tiny bit of moisture but it was next to nothing, and the reason why was that the process of water creation in the soil takes place away from the equator and close to either morning or night, and the Apollo astronauts had none of these things happening - they were near the equator, and it was daytime.
Final note: I'm posting this entry now because it's exciting news, but I suspect it might be hard to get Daily Kos really behind this until health care reform is passed because at the moment all the calls to one's representative/senator etc. need to be about health care. That's priority #1. But do keep this in mind, and once health care reform has succeeded (I know you'll succeed) perhaps we can try to get the ball rolling on this as well, in making sure that elected officials know about this news and also making sure the public is also aware that the Moon is no longer the Moon as we thought it to be.