The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) has just released the full data on last year's mission to find out whether there are usable amounts of water on the moon, and the news is good. There is plenty of frozen water on the moon, plus frozen gases like methane, oxygen and hydrogen that would be useful for making rocket fuel. This will be very helpful to the Chinese and the Indians when they start to build their bases on the moon.
The United States is not going back to the moon. That plan died when President Barack Obama canceled the first new U.S. launch vehicles in 25 years, the Ares series of rockets, last February. That put an end to NASA's hopes of returning to the moon by 2020 and building bases there for further manned exploration of the solar system.
Obama promised to support the development of commercial manned spacecraft instead, but those will only be capable of low-orbit operations for the foreseeable future. Gen. Charles Bolden, the current head of NASA, loyally chimed in with blue-sky talk of a glowing future for the agency.