The prevalent plan is to extract water from the fine dust deposits found in the moon’s north and south poles and separate it into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen would be used as fuel to allow space travel beyond the moon, while the oxygen would be utilized to sustain life. At the moon’s north pole alone, an estimated 60 million tonnes of water is available for extraction. “If we convert all of that water into shuttle fuel, we could launch a shuttle per day for more than 2,000 years, just with the water that’s at the north pole,” said Dale Boucher, ISRU and Space Mining Consultant. “There’s a lot of water on the moon. It’s not as dry as we thought it would be.”