Moon Smashing

Some necessary prep work will soon be done for the lunar program (Space.com - NASA Takes Aim at Moon with Double Sledgehammer):

NASA's previous Lunar Prospector mission detected large amounts of hydrogen at the moon's poles before crashing itself into a crater at the lunar South Pole. Now the much larger Lunar Crater and Observation Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission, set for a February 2009 moon crash, will take aim and discover whether some of that hydrogen is locked away in the form of frozen water.

Why is this important? Well, we can use the hydrogen and oxygen in the frozen water for fuel, it's a sort of "live off the land" approach that will be vital to really getting the next stage of lunar exploration and settlement going.