Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space Science

The Latest Lunar Bombardment

11 Comments

LCROSS will hit the moon in the middle of the night in this time zone, so I’m not sure whether I’ll get up for it. There was a lot of idiotic commentary (in comments) over here the other day. I wonder if the president will apologize for this unprovoked attack before, or after the event? Or does he only apologize for things that his predecessors did?

[Update a few minutes later]

It really is amazing to see the number of commenters sincerely worried that we’re going to knock the moon out of its orbit, or break it in half.

[Late evening update]

Frank J. was way ahead of NASA:

Now the world will be pretty convinced that America is frick’n nuts and just looking for a fight, but we need to really ingrain it into everyone’s conscious so that no one will ever even contemplate crossing us. This requires making good use of our nukes. I know, nukes can kill millions of people, but they sure aren’t doing anyone any good just sitting around. I mean, how many years has it been since we last dropped a bomb on someone? No one even thinks we’ll actually use one now. Of course, using nukes shouldn’t be done haphazardly; all uses have to be well planned out because the explosions are so cool looking that we’ll want to give the press plenty of notice so they can get pictures of the mushroom cloud from all sorts of different angles. But what to nuke? Well, usually the idea is populated cities, but, by the beliefs of my morally superior religion, killing is wrong. So why can’t we be more creative than nuking people. My idea is to nuke the moon; just say we thought we saw moon people or something. There is no one actually there to kill (unless we time it poorly) and everyone in the world could see the results. And all the other countries would exclaim, “Holy @$#%! They are nuking the moon! America has gone insane! I better go eat at McDonald’s before they think I don’t like them.”

Of course, Frank’s always been way ahead of the curve.

11 thoughts on “The Latest Lunar Bombardment”

  5. They shouldn’t worry – after all, NASA is just faking the collision with special effects in a studio.

    Isn’t it?

  7. “It really is amazing to see the number of commenters sincerely worried that we’re going to knock the moon out of its orbit, or break it in half.”

    I’ve pointed out in several places where similar concerns were expressed that the Moon is covered with naked-eye evidence that NATURE has been pounding the crap out of the Lunar surface from day one, with more massive objects than we can possibly throw at it (which should be insanely obvious to anyone…silly me) yet everything is still moving pretty much as expected. The solar system just isn’t as delicate as they think.

    And that this isn’t even the *most* massive object we’ve dropped there, those would have to be the Saturn S-IVB stages from most of the Apollo missions. (And if I’m still around when it’s possible, I’d love to personally visit those impact sites and others.)

    Then there are those who think LCROSS will actually blow a significant fraction of the total Lunar water/ice away, leaving little for future use…

  8. Other than pointing out that the Moon weighs more than 30 million trillion times the mass of the LCROSS booster, it may help to point out that 9 of the empty Saturn-IVb boosters from several of the Apollo missions were intentionally impacted into the Moon to test seismometers placed by the Apollo astronauts. Each of these boosters weighed at least 5 times as much as the LCROSS booster.

    The degree of innumeracy on display in some of these comments is disturbing.

  9. It really is amazing to see the number of commenters sincerely worried that we’re going to knock the moon out of its orbit, or break it in half.

    To be fair, these are people who think that aligning less than 1% of the mass of the solar system all on one side of the sun will cause the Earth to explode or some such nonsense.

  10. I was underwhelmed by the coverage.

    And the best part was hearing for the last 3 days, how we were going to “see” the collision and expanding debris cloud from cameras on the chase vehicle, and then it didn’t really happen that way. But the screen going white, then returning to the view inside JPL was pretty edgy. Watch out Hollywood, NASA is coming for you!

    Correct me, but wasn’t this supposed to visible wit a 10 Power telescope or better? You’d think in this day and age, SOMEONE would have thought to attach a camera to a telescope.

Comments are closed.