> I notice Musk's ISRU plan is to mine ice; I do wonder how he's going to do that, as it won't be easy.
Load up the icy dirt into a chamber using a digger, heat it up and precipitate out the water vapor. The only potential problem is separating out other volatiles, but fractionation is pretty basic tech.
Provided you have a decent power source that's easy: the hardest part is getting your raw material into the chamber and disposing of the debris afterwards. Humans driving flat-pack bulldozers, most likely.
You could probably heat up the regolith while it's on a conveyor belt and use a negative pressure system to draw off the vapour through cooling tubes, so it could operate continuously.
Load up the icy dirt into a chamber using a digger, heat it up and precipitate out the water vapor. The only potential problem is separating out other volatiles, but fractionation is pretty basic tech.