[J Edgar]

So if water is so abundant on the moon, why didn’t the Apollo and/or Lunar Lander missions discover this?

Just asking?

[frithguild]

So if water is so abundant on the moon, why didn’t the Apollo and/or Lunar Lander missions discover this?

Because they never actually went there?

[OldDeckHand]

"So if water is so abundant on the moon, why didn’t the Apollo and/or Lunar Lander missions discover this?"

Because the astronauts didn't set off massive explosions just under the Moon's surface. If they had, they would have discovered the water. It took NASA another 40 years and the successful execution of LCROSS moon operation to make such a confirmation...

Water on the Moon Confirmed by NASA Crashes

It's official: There's water on the moon—and a "significant amount" of it, too, members of NASA's recent moon-crash mission, LCROSS, announced today.

[SunkenCiv]

There’s not a lot of water on the Moon, just more than previously thought. And it’s still not a lot. The Moon, having 1/100th the mass of the Earth, doesn’t hold on to gas, and water winds up transitioning directly from ice to vapor pretty easily in a vacuum or near-vacuum.

The Apollo missions didn’t spend an awful lot of time on the surface, and much of that was spent in rock retrieval, plus they had to photograph each rock six or eight times. :’) The main discovery was that impact was over 99 percent dominant in the “geology” of the Moon.