A bottle of one of the most expensive brands of water costs $40 and is presented in a frosted glass container decorated with crystal. On the moon, a bottle of water would run about $50,000 and forget about that heavy crystal glass. That is because it costs around $50,000 per pound to launch anything to the moon. Discovering water on the moon would be like finding a gold mine.
In fact, scientists have discovered evidence for water or hydrogen, a component of water, in special places on the moon. Since the moon is not tilted much from its rotation axis, the depths of certain craters in the lunar poles may not have seen the sun for billions of years. The long night over these areas, called Permanently Shaded Regions (PSRs), will have made them very cold and able to trap water molecules as ice or hydrogen.
And so, the search for water on the moon has a On 9 October 2009, a spent Centaur rocket struck the persistently shadowed region within the lunar south pole crater Cabeus, ejecting debris, dust, and vapor. This material was observed by a second “shepherding” spacecraft, which carried nine instruments, including cameras, spectrometers, and a radiometer. Near-infrared absorbance attributed to water vapor and ice and ultraviolet emissions attributable to hydroxyl radicals support the presence of water in the debris. The maximum total water vapor and water ice within the instrument field of view was 155 ± 12 kilograms. Given the estimated total excavated mass of regolith that reached sunlight, and hence was observable, the concentration of water ice in the regolith at the LCROSS impact site is estimated to be 5.6 ± 2.9% by mass. In addition to water, spectral bands of a number of other volatile compounds were observed, including light hydrocarbons, sulfur-bearing species, and carbon dioxide
So, if we set up colonies on the moon, PSRs are where we want to be, or at least, where we want to go and get our water. You may not have to wait for long before we get one step closer. This lunar ice drill design was just unveiled and is (tentatively) scheduled to be deployed in 2020.