still from "Le voyage dans la lune", a 1902 film by George Méliès

Barry came across the story on Twitter late yesterday, but this is an excerpt from The Huffington Post report:

NASA is launching a dramatic mission to bomb the moon.

The LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite) mission will send a missile traveling at twice the speed of a bullet to blast a hole in the lunar surface near the moon's South pole.

Scientists expect the impact of the Centaur rocket to be powerful enough to eject a huge plume of debris from the moon. The moon dust should even be large enough to be seen from earth through telescopes 10-to-12 inches and larger, says NASA.

I don't know, it might actually be a worthy cause, and the idea of bombing stuff is very American, but attacking heavenly bodies just seems so unfriendly, . . . so, warlike.

It's just too bad the incursion is unlikely to be exciting enough to distract our armchair warriors in Washington - and elsewhere around the country - from blowing up people and stuff here on Earth.

Okay, my second thought is how come we hadn't heard about this dramatic mission earlier? Is the NASA's public relations department that lame? Maybe they were deliberately trying to keep it low key, perhaps to avoid street demonstrations, although by now we've all learned that liberal and progressive protest never works in this country.

image from momlogic, found while Googling]