NOT WITH MY EXTRATERRESTRIAL BODY, YOU DON'T!

The year is 1959 and I am just a wee lad, barely over the age of one. There are a host of life threatening perils that many children can face: Lead based paint chips careening off of walls, toddler-aged diseases like measles, chicken pox and meningitis, not to mention drowning and suffocation. But the biggest threat to my young life came from a much scarier source: THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE!

It seems that a team of “Rocket Scientists,” (accidental pun NOT intended) led by Physicist Leonard Reiffel, of the “Armour Research Foundation,” were secretly hatching a plan to send an atom bomb into outer space and letting it detonate on the moon. Guess who else was in on this great idea? Carl Sagan. Yes, the “Billions and billions of stars,“ Carl Sagan.The reason for the secret plan? To show the Russians, who had just launched, “Sputnik” into outer space, that we Americans were the dominant species commanding outer space. Sounds like the plot of a bad  ‘50’s “B” sci-fi film!

Problem #1: What law or idea gives a government the right to punch holes in an unsuspecting planet? Doesn’t the moon get beat up enough by asteroids? Do we really have to give it more of a Swiss cheese look?

Problem #2: Did any of those clowns know exactly what would happen if you opened a can of “Woop ass” on the moon? We’re talking atom bomb here, not a bag full of “Cherry bombs!” What if that explosion could have triggered a seismic event and blew the moon to bits? Think of the cultural destruction it could have caused. We wouldn’t have had songs like, “Moonlight feels right” by Starbuck. Or,”Dancing in the moonlight,” by King Harvest, Van Morrison, or Thin Lizzie. And I like those songs. The lyrics to “Fly me to the moon” would have to be changed to, “Fly me to that floating mass of dust and debris!” Try singing THAT with any real emotion.

Problem #3: What if blowing up the moon didn’t faze the Russians one single bit? I can think of so many better ways to show the Ruskies that we are BAD ASSES. Fly a hot air balloon over Moscow and dump hundreds of 8X10 glossies showing average Americans eating haggis. NOBODY messes with people who eat haggis! If the haggis doesn’t work, replace the photos with pictures of Charles Atlas, Steve Reeves and Vic Tanny. Nobody is more intimidating than a bodybuilder.

Problem #4: What if detonating an atom bomb on the surface of the moon did absolutely nothing? As if the moon pulled down its pants and said, “Kiss this!” Wouldn’t we look stupid!

Thankfully, the project was scrapped and no bombs went off. The official reason for this was that the scientists didn’t want to put the American people in jeopardy. Did cooler heads prevail? Probably not. Little boys shouldn’t play with big bombs in outer space, especially if they don’t REALLY know the outcome.

But the story doesn’t end there.
In case anybody doesn’t remember, the boys at NASA decided that they needed to know whether there is water on the moon. Why, you ask? Well, just in case we need to colonize it when we run out of usable space here, we will have plenty of water to drink and make sno-cones out of.
So, on October 9, 2009, the NASA boys sent LCROSS into space. That’s LUNAR CRATER OBSERVATION AND SENSING SATELLITE for short. The large, empty shell of the rocket booster called “Centaur” weighing 5,081 pounds, (or, for a reference point, a 1973 Cadillac Sedan Deville with four occupants) impacted on the moons south pole with the equivalent force of 2 tons of T.N.T sending a plume of  dust and debris high above the moons surface. It was later analyzed by NASA and was said to contain water vapor. Go figure! The smaller shepherding spacecraft weighing only 1,369 pounds impacted on the moon minutes later causing a much smaller vapor plume than the first.

Some may argue that the earths weather patterns have been completely wacky since we punched some holes in that big, round piece of cheese, but I myself tend to think that global warming is the real culprit. At least the NASA boys didn’t blow it to bits!