Why the Moon's Dirt Might Matter More Than Its Views
For most of the space age, the Moon has been treated as a destination, somewhere to land, plant a flag, collect a few rocks, and leave. That framing is quietly changing. A growing part of the space industry now looks at the Moon less as a place to visit and more as a place to mine, and the technology behind that shift has a name that sounds bureaucratic but covers some genuinely difficult engineering: in situ resource utilization, or ISRU.
