Moon River

Discoveries announced this week kind of make this song have additional meaning, don't you think?

Of course, that water has been discovered on the Moon doesn't come as a big surprise to me; I'd always assumed water would be found there. It's abundant on Earth, so one could reasonably assume that it would be found on the Moon, since both were created in the same general neighborhood. Comets pounding one object, bringing water from the sky, would tend to pound another object just next door.

Of course, the amounts of water found ont he moon -- 32 ounces in a ton of regolith, they estimate -- is not big. One cannot stick a soda straw in the moon and find a handy drink. But the molecule is there.

So the question remains: What will we do about it? When I was a kid -- and this was at the tail-end of the Apollo program -- I expected there would be moon bases by the turn of the century. I've been a bit disappointed in that regard. Maybe someday . . .