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Sometimes, it seems like the moon isn’t cool anymore. It’s old hat — constantly swinging through the sky, looming over the world in attention-grabbing size and color. People have even walked on it! Though it’s undoubtedly still chock fuck mysteries to solve, most astronomers now view the moon as must a stepping-stone to more alien investigations. We can take pictures of it, sure, but only to inform how to take later, cooler pictures of exoplanets in distant galaxies. We can try to land on it once again, definitely, but only as a stepping stone to Mars and beyond. Even a permanent moon-base is now described as a staging point for our assumed future traveling between planets. Now, NASA has approved a plan to survey the moon’s surface for ice — because ice may be the key to our later efforts, on even trendier worlds.

The plan is called Lunar IceCube, part of the exceedingly well-acronymed Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) program. It will survey the distribution of water ice on the surface of the moon, but astronomers already have a use for that information in mind. Beyond any of the basic scientific insights they might gain by studying the behavior of frozen water in space, NASA hopes that a lunar ice map could let them plan where to settle human beings as a stepping stone to the rest of the solar system.

Getting to the moon will require that the Lunar IceCube take a circuitous route that uses the gravity of the sun, Earth and moon.
Credits: NASA/Dave Folta

NASA’s big, long-term thinkers have long been saying that if the agency could set up a major, permanent base on the moon, it could significantly decrease the costs for every following launch. It would do this by acting as a staging and launch area at the bottom of a much, much weaker gravity well that that of the Earth. You’ll notice a problem, here: if we have to launch all the stuff first from the Earth to the Moon, and then from the Moon to space, we might as well just launch the things straight into space. A lunar base only makes sense if that lunar base produces some parts of the mission itself — hopefully, heavy things like bulk building materials, replacement drinking water, and, perhaps most importantly, rocket fuel.

Water can be hydrolyzed into pure hydrogen and oxygen, creating rocket fuel with nothing but water and electricity. But doing so requires a steady, reliable supply of water — you certainly don’t want to spend billions on a moon base, then realize that the richest vein of ice lies several hundred kilometers away. By mapping ice distribution on the moon, NASA hopes to figure out where, if anywhere, a cost-saving lunar launch facility could actually work.

Of course, space-water is also of basic scientific interest, since it’s crucial to the continuation of life — both alien microbes and astronauts trapped potentially several light-minutes from home. Understanding water, where to find it and how it behaves, will be important as NASA pours resources into the search for alien life.

Lunar IceCube will use a new low-thrust ion thruster propulsion system.

Lunar IceCube is a so-called cubesat, a type of super-tiny, single-purpose satellite that has not been in the testing phases for very long. They only recently started being included as regular passengers on all-purpose cargo launches, and those that have gotten all the way to space have generally stayed in orbit around the Earth. They can take pictures of clouds, or maybe coordinate with other cubesats in orbit, but the idea behind having tiny, single-purpose spacecraft was always that they would make it easier to project human curiosity out into the solar system at large. Lunar IceCube could be an important proof of concept for putting tiny robot cubes beyond Earth orbit.

The launch itself will happen aboard NASA’s Exploration Mission 1 (EM1), which is itself planned to be the inaugural launch of the US Space Launch System (SLS). SLS is supposed to make America once again an all-round space power, rather than a world-leading specialist in space tech that farms launch concerns out to contractors and other governments. As any and all contact with Russia gets ever more politically touchy, decreasing dependence on Russian launch technology will be a big part of keeping NASA on legislators’ good sides.

EM1 could be ready to launch with Lunar IceCube by 2018, but that’s very likely to be delayed since the maiden voyage of a new brand launch vehicle, from a brand new launch facility, is one of the more complex things that any group of human beings can attempt. Whenever it does go up, though, Lunar IceCube will be on board, ready to search the moon for a possible first step into permanent settlement in space.