[rueful]

it could be the last time you do.

NASA plans to launch a powerful missile aimed directly at the South pole of the moon with the goal of blasting a hole in the lunar surface.

http://chattahbox.com/science/2009/10/0 ... for-water/

personally, this is probably the best and smartest way NASA has come up with of wasting money, but thats just MHO

[sweetnahmah1]

we're launching missles at the moon?

[ATrain]

we're launching missles at the moon?

Yep

[HenryGale]

I set my Tivo

[rueful]

i seriously am so excited about this. Does anyone have any idea about like, will we see the explosions when they hit or anything like that?

[Covert Hawk]

we're launching missles at the moon?

I just hope we don't miss and hit Uranus.

[rueful]

the video i just watched about it said its costing tax payers $79 million dollars

[BJWilliams]

we're launching missles at the moon?

I just hope we don't miss and hit Uranus.

"wait...Im receiving word that actually is a planet"

[El Scorcho]

personally, this is probably the best and smartest way NASA has come up with of wasting money, but thats just MHO

Are you implying that NASA is a waste of money? Not that you would need to be implying that for me to disagree with you completely (because I do), but I am curious.

[rueful]

no i know they do alot more than put people on the moon, and i dont think the entire program is a waste of money. But much of what they do is a waste of money. Even if there is water on the moon, how does that make life any better or worse. I just feel like if were going to be investing that kind of money there should be some sort of benefit.

[adam42381]

we're launching missles at the moon?

I just hope we don't miss and hit Uranus.

Tony Kornheiser would approve of your post.

[ALUmnus]

I think it's interesting that they don't know if there's water on the moon, the closest celestial body to the earth, because of shadows....but they can tell us for certain about water/life/weather/makeup/etc of stars and planets billions of lightyears away. Scientists can basically tell us whatever they want and we pretty much have to believe them because the rest of us are too stupid to even understand what they're saying.

And what's with this obsession with finding life, something we have no idea that it exists? Find us resources that we can actually use and get some benefit from.

[El Scorcho]

Even if there is water on the moon, how does that make life any better or worse. I just feel like if were going to be investing that kind of money there should be some sort of benefit.

*sigh*

Some sort of benefit?

Why is ice on the Moon important?

The ice could represent relatively pristine cometary or asteroid material which has existed on the Moon for millions or billions of years. A robotic sample return mission could bring ice back to Earth for study, perhaps followed by a human mission for more detailed sampling. The simple fact that the ice is there will help scientists constrain models of impacts on the lunar surface and the effects of meteorite gardening, photodissociation, and solar wind sputtering on the Moon. Beyond the scientifically intriguing aspects, deposits of ice on the Moon would have many practical aspects for future manned lunar exploration. There is no other source of water on the Moon, and shipping water to the Moon for use by humans would be extremely expensive ($2,000 to $20,000 per kg). The lunar water could also serve as a source of oxygen, another vital material not readily found on the Moon, and hydrogen, which could be used as rocket fuel. Paul Spudis, one of the scientists who took part in the Clementine study, referred to the lunar ice deposit as possibly "the most valuable piece of real estate in the solar system". It appears that in addition to the permanently shadowed areas there are some higher areas such as crater rims which are permanently exposed to sunlight and could serve as a source of power for future missions.

Yeah. There's no benefit to water on the moon at all. Except for the small part where it effects almost everything we plan on doing in space from here on out.

no i know they do alot more than put people on the moon, and i dont think the entire program is a waste of money. But much of what they do is a waste of money.

Much of what they do, huh? Like what? I disagree strongly. That's not to say I think they're an efficiently functioning program. It's as bureaucratic as anything run by the federal government and I wish it was a private program. However, as government waste goes, NASA is a drop in the bucket and almost everything they do is worthwhile in much bigger ways than anything our government is doing otherwise.

I think it's interesting that they don't know if there's water on the moon, the closest celestial body to the earth, because of shadows....but they can tell us for certain about water/life/weather/makeup/etc of stars and planets billions of lightyears away. Scientists can basically tell us whatever they want and we pretty much have to believe them because the rest of us are too stupid to even understand what they're saying.

Uh, speak for yourself. I've done a lot of reading in the realm of physics, astrophysics and astronomy and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the basics of how we know what we know. Scientists can tell us a lot of things about stars and planets great distances away. They can tell us about weather on planets that are close enough for us to make atmospheric observations or planets that we've probed. We cannot scan for life on remote planets, but we have been able to probe the surface of Mars directly, which is a little different. We know the elements present in remote stars because of the light they emit. We do not know chemical compositions until we sample them directly. That's why we had to probe Mars to find out if there was water there.

[rueful]

thats great and all if the world ever does turn into star trek. I think space exploration is semi-worthless. Lets say we do find that some plant is made up of pure natural resources that would make life that much better, that would be great and the best case scenario for space exploration. But how realistic is it that we cant get that stuff back to earth? Even if they do find water up there through this, then its just going to lead to wanting more money for further future explorations and setting up a station on the moon, costing more money, all for further hypothetical situations. And its a waste because odds are, this will happen and it will be confirmed that there isnt water on the moon.

[Covert Hawk]

Space for the Free Maket

Forty years ago today, in one of the milestones of human history, two Americans stepped out onto the surface of another world. It was a triumphal moment for human genius, and the appearance of the moon in the sky each night since July 20, 1969, reminds us just what we are capable of achieving. The success of Apollo 11 gave rise to giddy hopes of permanent space colonies and interplanetary travel by the end of the 20th century.

But since then, fewer than 500 humans have entered space. On July 20, 2009, 13 people are aboard the still-incomplete International Space Station. Seven of them arrived last week on NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour. The shuttle, a clunky vehicle largely unchanged from its 1970s design, was originally intended to be a temporary technology, to be used no more than a couple dozen times. The current mission is its 125th. No one has stood on the moon since December 14, 1972. As Carl Sagan said, "None of us has gone anywhere since the glory days of Apollo except into low earth orbit -- like a toddler who takes a few tentative steps outward and then, breathless, retreats to the safety of his mother's skirts."

Part of the reason is that, as Sagan also noted, the Apollo program was about Cold War geopolitics, not science. After Apollo 11 provided the desired propaganda boost, government interest and funding began to dry up. Air travel was common a quarter-century after the Wright Brothers’ 1903 mission at Kitty Hawk, and planes traversed the Atlantic regularly just a decade after Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 flight. But nearly a half-century after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, commercial voyages there are expensive and rare.

"Why are no regularly scheduled commercial spaceflights available?" asks NASA veteran Ed Hudgins. "Because no government agency that runs with the efficiency of the Pentagon and the U.S. Postal Service will ever realize the dream of commercially viable orbiting stations or moon bases." The astronauts aboard the space station today are no less brave and no less talented than Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but they and those who would join them in the next phase of human space exploration are hampered by bureaucracy. Competition can set them free.

For all the storybook lessons of Columbus and Magellan setting sail to find "new worlds" for their government sponsors, the primary motivation for exploration has always been profit. Hudgins has noted that early attempts to get mankind off the ground were motivated by money. "The Wright brothers acted as private individuals, pursuing their own vision and using their own money," he wrote. "Lindbergh was trying to win the privately offered $25,000 Orteig Prize. Much of early civil aviation was funded privately." Even the first government aviation "funding" was in the form of a prize to a private inventor.

After Apollo 11, a private company, American Rocket, offered to sell launch services to NASA and to private businesses. But NASA "planned to monopolize government payloads on the shuttle and subsidize launches of private cargo as well," according to Hudgins. NASA turned down American Rocket, and adopted a new role as a galactic trucking service. In the 1980s, as NASA struggled to build a space station, Houston-based Space Industries offered to do the job for a maximum of $750 million, promising a "mini-station" for government and private use. Though this mini-station would have helped NASA build its own larger space station, NASA feared competition might lead to funding cuts and turned down the offer. The NASA space station was never built.

But things are beginning to change. Another important space anniversary will come this fall. Five years ago this October, SpaceShipOne, the first entirely privately funded space vehicle, took off beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Space enthusiast Richard Branson was there watching that day, and set up a company called Virgin Galactic to develop a suborbital spacecraft that can carry six passengers. While Virgin Galactic intends to first cater to wealthy space tourists, the company also has hopes of supplanting NASA’s role in launching scientific and commercial satellites into orbital space. Virgin Galactic is not alone in the growing "NewSpace" industry. Private firms like Orbital Sciences and Space Exploration Technologies are signing lucrative rocket contracts, and Spaceport America is under construction in New Mexico.

These private efforts, and growing competition, will lower the cost of going into space. Just as automobiles and airline tickets are no longer only available to the wealthy, a free market in space could make exploration, commercial travel, and even settlements an inexpensive reality.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=142

[Libertine]

thats great and all if the world ever does turn into star trek. I think space exploration is semi-worthless. Lets say we do find that some plant is made up of pure natural resources that would make life that much better, that would be great and the best case scenario for space exploration. But how realistic is it that we cant get that stuff back to earth? Even if they do find water up there through this, then its just going to lead to wanting more money for further future explorations and setting up a station on the moon, costing more money, all for further hypothetical situations. And its a waste because odds are, this will happen and it will be confirmed that there isnt water on the moon.

For some reason, I imagine someone using many of the same type of arguments against the study of aviation a hundred years or so ago.

"So what if you can eventually develop some sort of flying machine? What good is it going to do anyone?"

[El Scorcho]

thats great and all if the world ever does turn into star trek. I think space exploration is semi-worthless. Lets say we do find that some plant is made up of pure natural resources that would make life that much better, that would be great and the best case scenario for space exploration. But how realistic is it that we cant get that stuff back to earth?

What are you talking about? Who said anything about hauling anything back to Earth?

Even if they do find water up there through this, then its just going to lead to wanting more money for further future explorations and setting up a station on the moon, costing more money, all for further hypothetical situations.

I don't think you understand why NASA does what it does. At all. And again, the amount of money spent on NASA is a very tiny fraction of the spending our government does. If you want to gripe about things the government wastes money on, there are things getting a much bigger slice of the pie and doing much less with it.

And its a waste because odds are, this will happen and it will be confirmed that there isnt water on the moon.

Where'd you get your odds? Do you have some numbers to go with that or were you just saying it? And how do you figure something is waste just because it comes back with a negative result? The only way to know for sure is to test it. Guess we should call off all research into things assumed to be unlikely. We never discover anything new that way anyway.

[ATrain]

I agree with El Scorcho, there are bigger things that government wastes money on.

I support NASA, but I just wish we'd sell advertising on the sides of the space shuttles and rockets. Imagine how much revenue could be brought in if companies paid $$$ to have their logos broadcasted to TV screens across America on CNN or FOXNews everytime we send a rocket into space.

[RubberMallet]

and the moon didn't cooperate....noone saw it. the lcross rocket disintegrated. the problem is we already knew that there was water on the moon. they didn't need to do this.

enjoy

http://www.enterprisemission.com/SmokingGun2.htm

[LUconn]

Do you think it's fun to be insane, or just a burden being the only one who knows these kinds of things?

[RubberMallet]

haha..

[El Scorcho]

and the moon didn't cooperate....noone saw it. the lcross rocket disintegrated.

It didn't disintegrate. It just didn't create the plume they were hoping for. NASA hyped it too much so it's turned into bad PR. However, the scientists got the data they needed even if no one saw it. Results are forthcoming.

[RubberMallet]

and the moon didn't cooperate....noone saw it. the lcross rocket disintegrated.

It didn't disintegrate. It just didn't create the plume they were hoping for. NASA hyped it too much so it's turned into bad PR. However, the scientists got the data they needed even if no one saw it. Results are forthcoming.

correct, it hit and there was no explosion..t.he rocket dissintegrated.

[matshark]

we're launching missles at the moon?

I just hope we don't miss and hit Uranus.

we'd probably hit Al Franken in that case.