NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has a vision for "sustainable" human exploration of the moon, and he cites the newly confirmed ice on the lunar surface as a key to success.
"We know that there's hundreds of billions of tons of water ice on the surface of the moon," Bridenstine said in an interview in Washington on Tuesday, a day after NASA unveiled its analysis of data collected from lunar orbit by a spacecraft from India.
The findings mark the first time scientists have confirmed by direct observation the presence of water on the moon's surface, in hundreds of patches of ice deposited in the darkest and coldest reaches of its polar regions.