There is a design for an ice-melting-slurry-bot that could be made, where the outer diameter of the bore is melted by heat/lasers - where the lasers/heat is also projected into a cone at the point of the bore-ing machine, where the center pipe is a vacuum to slurp up the slurry as it melts the ice around the bore-head...
The smaller pipe has less water in it, but the surface area the vacuum can act on is also smaller so the column of water equals out the same as with the larger pipe.
At sea level, that's about 30 feet deep. If you want to bring water up from deeper, you have to move the pump down the well and push the water up the pipe instead of trying to suck water up like the pipe's a straw.
We dont want the core samples intact (we want to kill microbiologics on the way down to the goal, which is the crust and determination for other vacuous caverns under the ice, via both vertical and horiz boring. and cameras in crytal lenses to withstand the heat or polarize against the lightwaves of the lasers such that they are clear and a good image can be seen.
/Sci-fi..
My original comment is my idea based on the 1960s patents for nuclear tunnel boring machines which use the reactor heat to exchange the tunnel walls to molten glass... (And I am really into DUMBS - as are many)
There are a lot of patents like this - so dont think this line of thought was abandoned, Hello Musk's Boring company... Good thing hes connecting State on a Deep level.
