This time, it's REAL

My space knowledge bona fides are well established on this site, so let's go around the solar system again!

I saw a show on the Discovery Channel yesterday in which plans were detailed to return (NASA, of course--that great spendthrift) to the moon in 2018.

I said, "you mean, GO to the moon for the FIRST TIME!" and then I looked around for somebody to high-five me, but I was alone and nude, so I low-fived my two friends the kiwis. It hurt, but in a John Cougar No Drop the Cougar No Put It Back In Mellancamp "Hurts So Good"-kind of way.

The plot is thinner than an Ethiopian fashion model: send a series of "rockets" into "outer space" and ferry supplies for a "base camp" to the moon. The NASA people actually pointed out that the moon is 25 times further away from the Earth than the space shuttle has ever traveled. Then, they confidently predicted that everything will go off without a hitch. Just for the record, I'm skeptical. *cough!* Mars Rover!! *cough!*

So, in 11 years, get back to me at the retirement home/soylent green plant and let me know what happened.

It's not that I don't like to send people to die on faraway rocks; no, I quite like the thought of sending to the moon some Johnny Navy pilot or Susie Sellout, who's toiled and hustled for Uncle Sam all his or her life, and who has climbed the slippery pole to get to be an astronaut. And then, the poor dumb bastard is at the mercy of solar winds and killer radiation, and all he/she has for a shield is Ray Bradbury and some NASA choad's theoretical physics. Oh, and everybody's optimism. Pray real hard, kids!

I turned the thing off after 30 minutes. Maybe it's feasible. Maybe it will even be done. But laying aside the question of whether NASA is even competent enough to build a working moon base, much less actually get it to the moon and get it set up, the largest objection to this silly mission is that we have plenty of problems here and now, and lunar colonization--even on such a small scale--is irresponsible, pie-(literally) in-the-sky propaganda that distracts from actual issues we must confront. And it's terribly, terribly expensive, at a time when we as a nation don't have gobs of money to wager on efforts that carry no practical application for anyone alive on our planet today.

The clincher was the utter goddamn waste of resources that the NASA folks in the show were for some reason completely proud of. I was stunned to hear, for instance, that they will launch a satellite next year that will orbit the moon and map the surface in great detail, so scientists can determine the best places to land and set up bases.

Well, you might ask, what's bad about that?

Only this: in the next breath, the same fucking scientist who just told me about the mapping project then breathlessly told me about how NASA is determined to make all the astronauts' water, oxygen, and fuel from deposits already on the lunar surface. How can NASA find these deposits? Kaloo-kalay! They have turned the Hubble Telescope around and pointed it at the moon. Hubble can see down to the surface, with infrared technology, and can show detailed, 3-D images of tiny rocks and oxygen deposits and other useful things as part of an overall image of the surface.

Did you get that? The Hubble Telescope can already see the lunar surface in great detail! But NASA apparently didn't figure that out until after it began building the mapping satellite, so now it has both a billion-dollar telescope that's already paid for, doing what it's not meant to do, scanning the moon's surface, and a billion-dollar satellite, doing what it was meant for, but which is the same thing the telescope is already doing.

The presentation in the TV show, which to summarize was, "We've already mapped the surface. Now we desperately need to map the surface!" left no doubt that NASA thinks you are a moron.

Try to put that out of your mind, though, because the next part is equally stupid. How can NASA test for water in the bottoms of craters? After all, as one super-disingenuous scientist facetiously stated, "You can't see the bottoms of craters--they're too dark!" I said, "Why don't you point your infrared telescope at them, you boob--you just got done explaining how Hubble can identify the chemical fingerprints of compounds on the surface!" But the NASA guy had another answer.

Shit, NASA isn't going to use spectrometry or any other science-y technique on this one. NASA instead has spent untold billions of your dollars and mine to build a sensor probe which is going to orbit the moon while its booster rocket detaches, accelerates, and slams into the lunar surface in a giant explosion. Yes, if you're keeping score at home, this is like saying, "I suppose I could perform your biopsy with care and using time-tested techniques that cause the least damage to your body and result in better results. But fuck it, I'm just gonna stick both arms in there and yank like fuck! Yeeee-haaaaaaw!!"

This is what happens when you let nerds have projectiles and there's a deranged fake cowboy in the White House who thinks everybody should be 'splodin' stuff.

Oh, the probe: it'll hang up in space and try to collect and analyze the dust shower that flies up from the surface. Should be lots of water vapor in there once that explosive rocket makes a big fireball.

Why can't we land a probe on the surface and just take a motherfucking sample? Because you're a pussy, that's why!

This pussy turned off his TV. And now I pray real hard that NASA's process for selecting astronauts is like the process for picking US Attorneys: please, God, let them all be Republicans!