The moon may have enough power for massive cities. There’s just one problem

There’s a sea of ice lurking on the dark side of the moon, but even that may not be enough to quench the thirst of a future lunar colony. Moon colonies have long been fodder for science fiction, but governments and private companies are racing now to make those extraplanetary dreams a reality. The main catch? Like the plot of every good hard sci-fi tale of humans in space, success hinges on the day-to-day drudgery of resource management. On the moon, water is that vital resource, made all the more important by its local scarcity. NASA describes the moon as “100 times drier than the Sahara,” but the confirmation of frozen water in the moon’s permanently shadowed areas raised hopes that explorers could tap into the stores for future lunar colonization. Those secret stashes of ice will be essential to any human activity on the moon, but experts say that the frozen liquid isn’t enough to build proper moon metropolises—not yet, anyway. In a research paper published in the journal Frontiers in Space Technologies, Martin Elvis, an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and Jonathan McDowell, a space sustainability analyst, explored just how much it would take for a larg…