Are we trying to start a war with the moon?

[ameliag]

Are we trying to start a war with the moon?

by Amelia G : October 8th, 2009

I hope we have recreational space travel within my lifetime. And I’d kind of prefer it if all the extraterrestrials didn’t hate Americans by the time that happens.

When I went to high school in Germany, my (brief) boyfriend at the time was beaten up by protesters during anti-American missile riots. His father actually was a Colonel in the U.S. Air Force, but the pacifists clocked him for a beating because he was hanging out with someone whose parents were attached to an African embassy. Although the hilarious irony of getting his ass kicked by pacifists was lost on their victim, the fact that Americans don’t always exactly get the benefit of the doubt abroad really is kind of a drag.

This weekend, NASA TV will be rebroadcasting an event they did today to raise awareness of the need for clean water. Guy Laliberte, founder of — wait for it — Cirque de Soleil, spent some time on the space station to put this fiesta together and other celeb participants included “former Vice President Al Gore, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Julie Payette, actress Salma Hayek and singers Shakira and Bono.”

But the salient point here is that WE JUST BOMBED THE MOTHERFUCKING MOON! In theory, the idea was to check whether the moon has water we could utilize. Presumably by bombing it. According to multiple accounts . . .

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Comments

Being an Ex-Physics type....

[brute-force.livejournal.com]

.. I feel a bit obliged to put a penny or two in.
The mass of aprox' 2.2 tons traveling about 3000/sec, Force = Mass * Acceleration. Acceleration = Velocity to the power of two. Yes, this is an impressive amount of force, but with the moons mass and stability of orbit, it has no chance of shifting it's orbit. Collision research is pretty common for finding the composition of any rocky thing in our solar system. The goal appears to be confirmation of the Indian research and expanding on it. It will expose subsurface materiel letting NASA know in greater detail the actual availability of the water there. AS to the cost, if it shows usable volumes of water, it will more than pay for itself in savings of bringing water to the moon. It can even be used in fuel production. In the future a vessel will be able to cut its lift off mass by up to a third.... I could go on but the math and such will even start to bore me let alone anyone who slogged though this far reading my response.