I watched the bombing of the Moon on BO-NBC, and nothing was visible. NASA’s pr trick—the first time anyone has paid any attention to the bureaucratic space cadets for many years—was a bomb.

HA HA HA UPDATE from a news service:

First a 2.2-ton empty rocket hull smacked the moon’s south pole at 7:31 a.m. EDT Friday. Then four minutes later the camera-and-instrument laden space probe made its death plunge. The smaller probe had five cameras and four other scientific instruments and NASA had touted live photos on its web site. But those images didn’t occur. NASA officials say they are sure the two probes crashed and are looking to see what happened to the pictures. Pictures were live until seconds before impact.

UPDATE from Steven Ng:

The results were not quite as spectacular as they promises. The Palomar observatory didn’t see squat. “The story coming out of the post-impact press conference is that scientists do not know exactly what LCROSS saw. LCROSS gathered strong spectroscopic signals, but officials were expecting a dramatic visible ejecta plume from the Centaur impact that was not obviously observed by any sensor. Instruments also detected an unexpected sodium flash in the data. Ground telescopes also observed suspected spectral data, but saw no apparent sign of a debris cloud.” The scientists are claiming it was successful, but “We need to analyze the data.”

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.