The Australian Space Agency (ASA) announced this week a new program to mine the Moon for water and other resources. Why? If water could be mined from the Moon’s surface, it could be used as a refueling station of sorts for manned missions to Mars and beyond. “Getting things from the surface of the Earth into orbit or into deep space costs a lot of money. If you can produce water in space for less than it costs to get there, then you’re ahead,” said Australian space engineer Andrew Dempster. Read more for another video and additional information.
“While ASA is less than nine months old, Australia’s cosmic ambitions go back to the earliest days of the space race. It was one of the first countries to launch a satellite from its own territory, sending a probe into orbit from the Woomera military site as early as 1967. And when Neil Armstrong made the first moonwalk two years later, it was Australia’s Parkes Radio Telescope that picked up the TV signals for most of the transmission that was broadcast to the world,” reports Bloomberg.
