NASA to bomb moon!

[lazarusty]

www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/06/18/u-s-to-bomb-moon-115875-21450011

U.S. TO BOMB MOON By Mike Swain 18/06/2009

Quest to find water

There are no aliens up there, as far as we know, but the Americans are preparing to bomb the moon.

A space mission blasted off from Cape Canaveral today carrying a missile that will fire a hole deep in the lunar surface.

But this is no gung-ho display of firepower - it is actually a serious quest for water.

Nasa scientists expect the blast to send out a plume of debris visible from Earth.

They want to see if any water or vapour is revealed in the huge space cloud.

If so, it could provide vital supplies for a moonbase.

The moon is mostly dry desert but ice may be trapped in craters which never see sunlight. The unmanned LCROSS mission - it stands for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite - will fire a Centaur rocket into the surface at twice the speed of a bullet.

An accompanying spacecraft will orbit the moon for a year looking for possible landing sites for astronauts.

[PeterB]

Lazarusty

I can't get the link to open, so I don't know what the article says.

However, keep in mind these facts:

1. NASA is not using a bomb, they're using a spent rocket stage (a Centaur rocket);
2. Back in the days of Apollo, NASA crashed five spent rocket stages on the Moon - the third stage of the Saturn V rocket - each weighing (by my calculations) about 14 metric tons, and thus a lot heavier than the Centaur.
3. The mass of the Centaur is minuscule in comparison to the mass of the Moon. The Moon's mass is about 75,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms, compared to the 1,000 kilograms of the Centaur. That is, the Moon is about 75,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more massive. By contrast, you're about 25,000,000,000 times as massive as a grain of sand. So if the Moon was scaled down to your mass, a grain of sand would be about 3 billion times more massive than the Centaur rocket.

[inconceivable]

I believe recently Nasa and Japan were going to bomb one of the Apollo landing sites with Penatrators are something like that. Also, originally didn't they talk about nuking the moon so that everyone could see we had been there.

[laurel]

How exactly would "nuking the Moon" make everyone "see we had been there"?

I bet Inconceivable isn't going to answer my question.

[Ian Pearse]

Jul 8, 2009 11:00:34 GMT -4 inconceivable said:

I believe recently Nasa and Japan were going to bomb one of the Apollo landing sites with Penatrators are something like that. Also, originally didn't they talk about nuking the moon so that everyone could see we had been there.

Not that I was aware of... any references?

[Jason]

Jul 8, 2009 11:22:20 GMT -4 laurel said:

How exactly would "nuking the Moon" make everyone "see we had been there"?

I bet Inconceivable isn't going to answer my question.

No bet.

[vq]

www.space.com/news/spacehistory/nuke_moon_000514.html

I think I originally saw this article from a link from elsewhere on this site... the part about using penetrators near an Apollo landing site seems implausible though.

[gwiz]

Jul 8, 2009 11:00:34 GMT -4 inconceivable said:

Also, originally didn't they talk about nuking the moon so that everyone could see we had been there.

Both the US (military, not NASA) and Russia had this idea back in the late 1950s, the theory being that such an explosion would be big enough to be analysed by earth-based instruments to gain data on the moon's composition.

In both countries, saner second thoughts occurred before any major work was carried out.

[lazarusty]

Nuking the landing sites, thus conveniently destroying any "evidence" of the landings - now isn't that a bright idea! So when someone eventually actually uses technology to find the rover, flags etc and can't find them NASA can say "We nuked them, sorry!" How convenient!

BTW, I've copied the article in the OP for those that couldn't get the link for whatever reason.

Other articles:

macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/7216/56

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nasas-mission-to-bomb-the-moon-2009-06

[laurel]

I noticed that the Macedonia Online article quoted from the same "Apollo 11 UFO transmissions" that James Oberg debunked in 1982.

www.debunker.com/texts/apollo11.html

[Data Cable]

Jul 8, 2009 21:13:02 GMT -4 @lazarusty said:

So when someone eventually actually uses technology to find the rover, flags etc...

Why is everyone always harping about finding the flags? There almost certainly are no longer any flags to find. Nylon doesn't hold up too well against 20 years of unfiltered sunlight.

[PhantomWolf]

Ummm, how would thoughts about using Nukes in the 1950's equate to blowing up the Apollo sites, which didn't exist until at least a decade later?

[gillianren]

So wait. I'm confused. (Or at least someone is.) NASA is going to bomb all the landing sites? Enough to obliterate all traces? That seems . . . well, as unlikely as the idea that smallpox went out of existence all by itself.

[drewid]

Especially as they'll have got the photo's back before LCROSS hits anyhow, and it's going for the south pole.

[ineluki]

Jul 8, 2009 5:05:54 GMT -4 @lazarusty said:

There are no aliens up there, as far as we know, but the Americans are preparing to bomb the moon.

No doubt using explosives that the Chinese in the Underground of NY left...