One point worth noting, as far as I can tell all the current research focuses on the surface. We simply don't know if there is water deeper than a few centimeters or feet under the surface.
Multiple missions that should be landing in the near future are looking just into that, in the south polar regions (Shackelton crater & co). So we should hopefully have some new data on this quite soon. :)
We could never send a Morse signal to the Moon or Mars - the aerial mast necessary for that would be reaching out of the atmosphere and you would need to burn amount of coal equivalent Mt Everest to power it!
(Paraphrasing a bit but I do remember reading such an article, where they explained how it was nonsense to send interplanetary messages with their long wave omnidirectional antennas and inefficient early radios, including the immense amounts of coal that would have to be burned to run the steam machines powering the dynamos. In the end we had a solar powered lander sending images back from Mars in 1997, using a couple wats.)
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[ 0.35 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] threadOn the Moon, this is what may be lacking.
On Earth, we can close loop recycle from drains. We can take sea water and desalinate. We can use osmosis and clean dirty ground water.
Is any of that cheap? Nope. But it's also not a blocker on having water to drink and bath with.
We will never run out of water, only "easy clean water".
By the time we have "one-million-person cities" on the moon, synthesizing water or hauling it from icy asteroids will not be a problem.
(Paraphrasing a bit but I do remember reading such an article, where they explained how it was nonsense to send interplanetary messages with their long wave omnidirectional antennas and inefficient early radios, including the immense amounts of coal that would have to be burned to run the steam machines powering the dynamos. In the end we had a solar powered lander sending images back from Mars in 1997, using a couple wats.)