<<It has been postulated that there is water ice deposited within lunar craters at the poles.>><br /><br />It hasn't been proven, that's what postulated means!<br /><br />Your kind of putting the horse before the cart here. Now you want to fling postulated ice around the Moon? Helium 3 and such might someday be usable, if Fussion can be made to work, right now it is useless and while there are a lot of usable Elements abundant in the Moon the cost of extracting them, let alone processing them and building something with them is a long way down the road.<br /><br />Personally I think the Moon will be a nice place to visit, to say you have been there, and it would be great for very stable large scale sensing devices that could be shielded from the commotion and electrical interference of Earth, but for a practical purpose I don't see that much reason to go back to the Moon.<br /><br /> Asteroids might, and I stress might, be usable, but we don't know the real composition of those we can reach easily, ie. those in predictable near Earth orbits. What we have seen so far are pretty much rocks with masses too low to be that valuable. Those that have value, that we find with high metal concentrations my be fairly small and isolated, hard to find, like panning for Gold. After all if you consider the constant bombarment from debris from Space most of it is dust by the time it reaches the surface. Substantial meteors reaching the ground are fairly rare, look at the commotion in New Zealand a few months ago.<br /><br /> As a thought there is an Asteroid passing relatively close to Earth, as reported by Space.com, that could have been easily reached, it's orbit has been defined since the 1980's. It comes back this way every four years or so and is big enough that it could provide a lot of information realatively quickly as to what we could hope to find. Why haven't we sent a probe to meet it? <br /><br />Either way the Moon offers no advantage over LEO. To go to the Moon you ha <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>