The lucrative reason why we should go back to the moon

What could possibly be so valuable on the moon that you pay $50 million to go there?

During the Apollo days it cost about $10 billion current day dollars to send astronauts on a round trip to the moon.

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Today we have a new space race to the moon, there are five teams left in the thirty million dollars Google Lunar X Prize.

This is an international competition to see which private company can reach the moon first, move 500m across its surface and transmit high definition video and images back to Earth.

But the really exciting part is what happens after the competition.

With resources like water ice and helium three, the moon is ripe for mining, with a potential value of hundreds of of trillions of dollars.

Based on information gathered from orbiting satellites, NASA estimates that there's over six hundred metric tons of water ice located in craters on the north pole of the moon.

This may not seem that exciting (water's not that rare or expensive), until you realize that water can be converted into rocket fuel, something that is very expensive.

This means we could effectively create a gas station on the moon!

Water can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen which can then be converted into rocket fuel.

Many rockets use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to power their engines, including the space shuttle.

In fact this type of rocket fuel is the most efficient and any known chemical rocket propellant.

If we were able to do this on the moon, then anyone who wanted to send a spacecraft on a particularly long journey would stop at this lunar gas station and pay you to refuel before continuing on their journey into deep space.

Just imagine if you had a monopoly on rocket fuel in the entire solar system!