The author looks at an ambitious Japanese proposal to install solar panels on the moon's surface and beam the resulting solar energy to stations on the earth.

Billions of tons of resources, ranging from water to gases to metals, have been detected on the Moon and further out into space, and both governments and private companies are navigating the ambiguous legal parlance to determine how to reach, extract and distribute it all.

Humans may not revisit the moon again until possibly 2020 at the earliest, but plenty of countries and private companies have targeted Earth's rocky satellite as a prime destination for robotic explorers. The last century's moon race between the United States and Russia has since given way to a new onslaught of unmanned lunar missions launched by Europe, Japan, China, India and the United States, which have helped uncover lunar water resources. Private entrepreneurs are also racing to land a homemade robot on the moon and win the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, which will reward the first private team to launch and land a spacecraft on the moon.

Buzz Aldrin and other space policy experts argue that the U.S. should not engage in a 'space race' to the moon with China and India as it would tie up resources that could be used to develop Mars-bound technology and would jeopardize the legacy of U.S. dominance in space exploration.

There is a lot more water on the moon than previously believed, according to an analysis of NASA data being published Friday, a finding that may bolster the case for a manned base on the lunar surface.

The Outer Space Treaty, an international space treaty created at the height of the Cold War, likely makes it very difficult for any party to claim rights to the lunar water scientists now say exists. That 1967 treaty, ratified by the U.S., China, India and 95 other countries, in effect prevents any nation from owning the moon.

The seemingly barren moon may actually be a treasure-trove of priceless resources: a potentially bountiful, mineral-rich – yet untapped – cosmic quarry. Still, few see the moon as an alluring mining site, ripe for the picking of rare elements of strategic and national security importance.

Future manned missions to the moon or Mars could use plants as bio-harvesters to extract valuable elements from the alien soils, researchers say.

NASA scientists are crowdsourcing lunar exploration by appealing to space fans to help identify features on the Moon - and even to discover the wreckage of long-lost spacecraft.

Future astronauts might end up living in a moon base created largely from lunar dust and regolith, if a giant 3-D printing device can work on the lunar surface.