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Early next year, a rocket is scheduled to lift off from Florida, heading for the moon. This rocket is to carry a spacecraft called Lunar Trailblazer, which is supposed to orbit the moon in search of water. Our friend Joe Palca has been talking for years with the scientist in charge of this mission, and Joe has a preview.
JOE PALCA: The moon is mostly a pretty dry place. But about 14 years ago, several teams of scientists found evidence that, in fact, there was some water there.
BETHANY EHLMANN: When we talk about water on the moon, we're not talking about lakes or oceans or any body of water that you could jump into and take a swim in, or even a puddle you could splash around in.
PALCA: Bethany Ehlmann is a professor of planetary science at Caltech. She's Lunar Trailblazer's principal investigator.
EHLMANN: We're talking about water in solid form, as ice. We're potentially talking about small amounts of water as gas or water vapor. And what we're really talking about, though, is a form of water that we don't think about much, which is water bound to rocks.
PALCA: Individual water molecules attached to the minerals in the rocks. As it orbits the moon, Lunar Trailblazer has instruments that should help scientists sort out the nature of the water and create maps of where to find it. It's also possible Lunar Trailblazer's instruments will reveal there's less water on the moon than scientists think. But that's not stopping space mining entrepreneurs who see a bonanza from lunar water - using it to keep future moonwalkers alive.
EHLMANN: Sometimes I'll walk into a room and I'll talk about Lunar Trailblazer - we're going to determine how much water on the moon and where it is. And I'll occasionally come across people who are like, oh, we know there's water on the moon at the poles, and here's the way that I'm going to mine it. And I'm like, well, that's interesting. I'm not sure there's water there, but go for it (laughter).
PALCA: Building any spacecraft is tricky and expensive. You need all kinds of specialized hardware, such as thrusters and instruments and solar panels. But those aren't actually what makes space missions expensive.
EHLMANN: The greatest proportion of cost on any spacecraft mission is, by far, the labor of people working on it. We don't shoot the dollars into space. Every dollar spent on a spacecraft mission is spent here on Earth.
PALCA: As space missions go, Lunar Trailblazer is a bargain. Its budget is in the tens of millions of dollars. Compare that with NASA's flagship moon mission, Artemis, that's costing in the tens of billions of dollars. But part of NASA's plans for keeping Lunar Trailblazer a bargain was to be ruthless about keeping it on budget. So 2 1/2 years ago, when Ehlmann learned the project was going over budget by several million dollars, her stress level went through the roof.
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EHLMANN: It's a little bit after 4 o'clock in the morning, and it's my 14th, 15th day in a row waking up sometime between 3:30 and 4:30, wide awake, with Lunar Trailblazer on my mind.
PALCA: In the end, NASA found some extra money to cover the overruns. Since we started talking two years ago, Ehlmann has told me about a variety of problems mission engineers have had to deal with - problems with the spacecraft's electronics, problems with components breaking in vibration stress tests, problems with its main engine. But NASA says, now, all the hardware is working as it's supposed to, and Lunar Trailblazer is ready to head to the moon and investigate what kind of water really is there.
For NPR News, I'm Joe Palca.
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