Lunar Gas Station: Donald Trump's New NASA Adviser Wants To Create Hydrogen Mines On The Moon

President-elect Donald Trumps's new NASA adviser plans to turn the Moon into a gas station.

Popular Science reported that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has appointed NASA's former senior adviser on commercial space Charles Miller back into the space agency, and the transition team is currently planning to build a lunar base for profit.

According to Space News, Charles Miller has worked with NASA from 2009 and 2012, which was the time when the agency was starting to develop its commercial space efforts.

The private space advocate and entrepreneur co-founded the company NanoRacks that offers a wide range of space services including helping researchers conduct their studies on the International Space Station (ISS). Among its clients are the European Space Agency (ESA), Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin.

charles Miller and the rest of the transition team will help improve the space agency's policies and goals as it continues its space explorations including finding more potentially habitable exoplanets as well as its mission to Mars in 2030.

The team will also decide if NASA will be building more of its own spacecraft and rockets or just partner with other spaceflight companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin for cheaper costs. SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos have already met with Donald Trump regarding their chances of collaborations in the future. 

Charles Miller has studied the possibilities of NASA to set up a permanent and crewed lunar base on the Moon, which could be a source of rocket fuel to private space companies. The base could be used to mine water from the Moon's craters that when split into hydrogen and oxygen could create gas. When this happens, space travel will finally become cheaper and easier for humans.

The study conducted by Charles Miller's team was funded by a $100,000 grant from NASA's Emerging Space Office last year.