Don’t Buy Your Ticket Just Yet

A NASA probe’s discovery of new evidence of water on the moon has scientists buzzing about “expanding human life” to the lunar surface. Not so fast. Indisputable evidence that there’s ample water in ice crystals sprinkled near the lunar poles cannot be obtained until NASA sends another probe there. And before any dreams of living on the moon can be realized, scientists must design and deliver equipment capable of mining the crystals at minus-280 degrees Fahrenheit and then heating them up a few hundred degrees to produce liquid water, oxygen and hydrogen fuel. Such temperature ranges would fracture a Minnesota millstone.

And it’s uncertain whether Americans would spend tens of billions of dollars to “boldly go” where quite a few men have gone already. Only last month congressional leaders accused NASA of “spinning out of control” when it disclosed that the international space station will cost $3.6 billion more than the original $17.4-billion ceiling. Similar cost overruns were tolerated in the Apollo program in the 1960s because most Americans at least wanted to go where no Soviets had gone before. But the scientific rationales now given for lunar colonists--they could build radio telescopes free from terrestrial radio emissions, for example--are scarcely as energizing.

There is, however, one powerful booster: entrepreneurial ambition. Former software kingpin Jim Benson, for instance, is getting advice from a NASA scientist in a dead-serious venture to mine minerals in space with robotized rockets. We may laugh, but . . .