NASA Loons to Bomb Moon

So the spacemen at NASA are bombing the moon on Friday, allegedly to search for water. If they find it, that would make a lunar military base cost just $22 squidzillion: a bargain! How much is the bombing costing? Ten times what they admit, whatever that is. Now, I am no exo-environmentalist, but bombing the moon strikes me as outrageous. Even worse was Nasa’s nuking Jupiter some time back. US, hands off this world, and others too.

UPDATE an aerospace engineer working for the Navy wrote to protest my description of this as a bomb, but I noted that dropping thousands of pounds at thousands of miles an hour was bomb-like to me. He responded:

In keeping with the general sexual undertones common to so many weaponry discussions, the technical term for such an object is a “penetrator”.  Since this particular penetrator will almost certainly include some steering rockets, which presumably will not use their entire fuel capacity, it will deliver some quantity of high explosive (rocket fuel), making it arguably a bomb and leading to a rather arcane discussion here in the office about the line between the two.  Conclusion is that a bomb releases more chemical / nuclear energy than the kinetic energy of impact, where a penetrator does the opposite. In any case, it’s not a very nice thing to do to any possible lunar life that would be supported by the water they are trying to find.  So if they find water and in the future wish to search for life, remind them that they already concluded there was no life, otherwise they already declared war on it with this mission.

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8:01 am on October 7, 2009