Скачать или смотреть Why Mining Lunar Ice Could Be a Huge Mistake | Space Café Podcast ft. Dr. Pascal Lee

What if humanity’s first Moon base shouldn’t be built around mining — but around meaning?

In this episode of the Space Café Podcast, Dr. Pascal Lee, planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center and Director of the Mars Institute, challenges one of space exploration’s most popular ideas: turning the Moon into a fuel station.

To refuel just one Starship, he explains, you’d need to mine the equivalent of 26 football fields of ice, locked in darkness at –240 °C.
The cost, energy, and logistics are astronomical.

So maybe the smarter move isn’t to chase ice — but to focus on science, presence, and purpose.
Because if our first steps on another world are driven by extraction, what does that say about us?


00:00 Intro – The myth of lunar ice
03:25 The true scale of mining a Starship’s worth of fuel
08:50 Why the Moon isn’t ready to be a gas station
14:40 Science before industry: what exploration should mean
18:15 A better path forward for humanity beyond Earth

Tags

#SpaceExploration #MoonBase #LunarIce #NASA #PascalLee #MarsInstitute #SpaceCafePodcast #Science #Humanity #SpacePhilosophy #Podcast