Two 2025 studies question whether lunar water can be extracted at an operationally useful scale, a prospect NASA's Lunar Trailblazer press kit puts at up to 600 million metric tonnes of ice in permanently shadowed regions.^[1] The first, a 2025 open-access review in Space and Planetary Resources, examined 27 simulated or experimentally tested extraction approaches and found inconsistent definitions and reporting, with no demonstration adequate to show scale-up to operationally useful tonnes.^[2] A separate 2025 value-of-information study found that uncertainty in deposit composition and technology performance is central to the business case for lunar water extraction, and argued that surface prospecting can therefore be worth more than its mission cost in representative scenarios.^[3]