Tea Time in Space

So, President Barack Obama has cancelled the mission to the moon, or as Hollywood would call it: Moon, The Return, starring Tom Hanks as the loveable but hard-nosed mission control director, and Megan Fox as the smart, sexy but ultimately misunderstood, mission commander. Hell I’d pay to see it.

Where was I? Oh right, let me get this straight, President Obama, a Democrat, has pulled the plug on a financially bloated and grossly unnecessary government-funded bridge-to-absolutely-nowhere venture that was initiated (or re-initiated) by President Bush, a Republican, in 2004. If memory serves, it was President Kennedy, a Democrat, who first set the goal of landing a man on the moon, which in turn created the lunar mission program only to be cancelled by President Nixon, a Republican, after Apollo 17 in 1972.

Up is down, right is left, dogs and cats living together, what is going on here?

I’ll admit I’m a bit of a space exploration geek. There is something innately fascinating about setting off to discover distant and alien places. After all it was that pioneering spirit that first drew explorers to shores of the St. Lawrence in search of new worlds and new civilizations, boldly going where no man had gone before. Yeah, well that’s crap. They came here for the money. Based on a radical notion that the world was indeed round, and not flat (except for Saskatchewan), they set off seeking a faster route to the orient to cut down on the cost of tea and spices. They gleefully hopped off their boat, jabbed their flag into the muddy shores, exclaiming La Chine! Meanwhile, the Iroquois watched from the hills thinking “this can’t be good”.

When they finally figured out they were an entire continent short of reaching the far east, they bought a trunkload of tobacco and pipes from the natives, clubbed a couple of beavers and sent their best salesmen back home to convince the elite that wearing rodent pelts on their heads and smoke inhalation would be the next great fashion trends. Damn they were good.

Let’s face it, the one and only reason for going back to the moon was to make money. Since we’ve sucked just about every drop of oil from the earth, to the point where some parts of Alberta are starting to look like the moon, why not start drilling into the nearest celestial body (and no, I am not referring to Megan Fox again)?

Wait a second, flying off to another planet to rape its resources, somebody ought to make a movie about that.

A recent NASA mission did something for which the agency has developed a disturbing affinity, that is to crash an exceedingly expensive vehicle. The LCROSS (or Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) was a probe designed to smash into the lunar surface, spraying millions of particles of moon bits into space. Knowing NASA's track record with these things, it had all the makings of another spectacularly embarassing failure. Imagine the headline:

NASA's High Impact Probe Couldn't Hit The Broadside of The Moon

Fortunately, this time the agency got it right. LCROSS slammed into the moon as planned, and poof, up when a plume of moon dust. The particles were then analyzed by a device I have dubbed the Articulate-matter Sensing System, or ASS, to determine if there were traces of frozen water on the moon. I’m not sure how frozen water on the moon somehow equals profit, unless they were also planning to find tea and spices there too, and so establish the first colony of genetically modified spiced-tea-drinking super-humans.

Well good news for all you lovers of billion year old, highly radioactive and insanely toxic water, they were right! I was however, disappointed to find out there were no traces of cheese.

If I’d only known that NASA was going to spend a terazillion dollars to travel to a desolate, remote and inhospitable place in search of water, I’d have gladly done it for half. Heck, after just a short drive out of town I could stand in the middle of a farmer’s field in minus 30 degree weather, it doesn’t get much more desolate, remote and inhospitable than that. And get this, there’s frozen water everywhere! I wonder if I have to supply my own earl grey and beaver pelt hat.