Moon Crash: Where’s the Water?

How many impoverished people would benefit with $79 million dollars especially in this recession? God did not create the moon to be bombed. What a waste of money.

Ned,
All things being equal, I’m betting that Heinlein “guessed” right once again: ice under the lunar surface that can be used for colonization (ie, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”).
Of course, that would mean we have to worry about the colonists throwing rocks!

In my view, this mission was a success. Negative information (e.g., that there does not appear to be water in the shadow of this crater) may be just as important as positive information (e.g., that there is evidence for the presence of water elsewhere). Now we know where not to look and can move on to other areas.
I went to NASA Ames with two young children to watch the impact. There were hundreds of people out there at 4:00am PST.
Well done NASA and great public outreach!

We’re 12 trillion in debt people. Just say NO to more moon bombings.

in response to……Why do we need to verify theres ice on the moon? Can’t we just open the freezer door or go to the Seven Eleven??
Posted by: chaddy cakes | Oct 13, 2009 1:41:36 PM
Dude….to see if the astronauts need to take a cooler when they colonize the moon. Better yet, they should take the new grooler…..it is a cooler and a grill all in one!!!! Whooohoooooo!!!!

Haha..ok. And another reason is because water is so much to transport and if and when we set up the moon station then we need to see if they can use the moons water to keep it sustained. Duh. You can really learn alot at nasa about this. Its a plan that has been in the works for years.

Where do you idiots think the money for this went.
They did not haul it to the moon and dump it there.
This is the kind of stimulus we should be spending money on and creating real jobs with.

what a waste of $. Who cares if there’s water on the moon. It’ll just turn into another piece of land to have a war over. Let’s fix what’s going on on Earth first and worry about the moon later…..I could use $190K of that $ to get rid of my mortgage and then I’d have more time and $ to put good use like helping kids with disabilities or something. NASA is a waste….

When water gets up to $4 a gallon, well then NASA is on to something.

yea right! nothing was ever sent up and nothing was ever seen on film. looks like a creative way to trick us out of more stimulas. 700,000,000

“A grand bill?” as space vehicles go, this is on the cheap. Think $250 million for your cell phone satellite,… and that’s just one, not a whole constellation. Multiply that times 20 to 50 depending on orbit and purpose. How about Google earth,… try $180 million a satellite. You’re happy to fill up the skies with transmitters so your kids can spend all day texting each other instead of learning to speak or read and write real sentences, but you don’t care about the knowledge that will be needed to make your children necessary. If your progeny have no place to live in a 1000 years, why are oyu having kids? Wasted? Not hardly,… don’t forget the majority of that money goes to scientist’s and engineer’s salaries,… who support families and pay taxes and buy green cars and houses. Wanna talk about wasting money? What about $42 M for studying the salt marsh field mouse in Pelosi’s district? The list goes on and on and on,… furthering science (real science), supporting exploration, defending the nation (internally and externally), and ensuring the future of the species is the only thing my tax dollar should be spent on. Frankly, I’m tired of supporting several welfare cheats and supplying schools for illegals.

They dare to compare this expense to the Stimulus Bill? What’s more important…our current economy,or the “possibility of microscopic water particles” on the moon? I appreciate science, but this money could have built (jobs!)another Bunker Buster for our protection!

“The Earth and the Moon are relatively close in size (4:1 in diameter, 81:1 in mass), unlike most planet/moon systems. Many people consider the Earth and Moon to be a double planet system (rather than a planet/moon system). The moon does not actually revolve around the Earth; it revolves around the Sun in concert with the Earth (like a double planet system).” Hmm..anyone interested in researching it just a bit more now? Some people need to pick up a science book and stop complaining.

PLEASE STOP WASTING TAXPAYER MONEY ON NON-ESSENTIAL PROJECTS….THAT INCLUDES THOSE ON EARTH AS WELL AS OUTERSPACE.
STOP FOREIGN AID AND BENEFITS FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS….WE NEED TO TAKE CARE OF OUR COUNTRY AND TT’S CITIZENS
FIRST !!

The Bible makes no mention of a lot of things..not a good argument. Thank you but try again. And we’re not going to be ‘living on the moon’ research it and then you will think twice about space exploration.

Well Said Mary Saint!

Just look how much water I could have made, from beer and wine, for that amount of money.

I’m sure glad NASA has stopped wasting money on missions with nominal scientific value such as the International Space Station in favor of missions like this that hold nominal scientific value but are on the moon. Much cooler waste of money. Bravo!
By the way, the moon is very near a planet that’s 75% covered with the stuff, but of course that would be under the purview of NOAA, not NASA.

Science used to be of, ‘The willing to progress & understand’ and had little to do with money and more to do with the value of time and morale.
Its best we stick to our progression, even though its costs are so much.
With the progression overall costs would come down, one would then adjust back to the reasoning of things.
So all hold hamds.
Osirus, Palms of Elijyah.

What? hamds i havnt aclue what that is, sounds like a person with the i missing? ok i made a typo, it was meant to read hands, :0
does anyone konw a Hamids?

It is the small nation that only looks after itself, solving its own problems. It is the small nation that only looks at today and solves today’s problems. It is the small nation that cannot see over the horizon, only reacting to events as they unfold.
How great our country is because we not only look forward to tomorrow, but we help shape it, too.

That $79,000,000 could have put an extra $3.00 in the pockets of 25 million unemployed people.
Of course, it would have cost about $200 million to do it, but what’s a few hundred million dollars of other people’s money to math-hating luddites?
Guess what? That money went to hiring people! Smart, hard working people, not lazy dopers and crackheads who want to complain about no one knocking on their door giving them $100,000 a year to sit around the TV hitting the pipe!

Magda, where do you think this money goes? It keeps people out of the unemployment lines. Dollars spent by NASA means contracts for American business which means jobs for American workers. Better jobs than cash for clunkers (of which a lot of it went to foreign workers) and road repair. This is some of the best stimulus you can buy.

Pow! Take that, moon!

I pay taxes for THIS!!! What the hell!!!
Cant Richard Branson donate money for this kinda lunacy!!!

I was amazed to learn from this article that the Hubble Space Telescope was in orbit around the Moon making observations of the impact. I thought it was still in orbit around the Earth! Or were the Operators of Hubble in orbit around the Moon?! Some serious questions about who was observing what with which instrument from where come to mind. Anyway, the implications of not finding water are serious. How can we possibly afford to bring all the water a Moon base would need with us?! Have all the R&D people who have been working on how to tap into Moon ice and convert it to water, fuel and oxygen been wasting their time and our money?!

I always get a good laugh over people who complain about spending money on science, exploration & research. Junk food brains are obese with ignorance. Science is our only true hope for survival. If knowledge is power, it appears that some of the posters on this website are intellectually anemic. Pump up those neurons by reading a book or going to the NASA website.
Posted by: Mary Saint | Oct 13, 2009 3:08:46 PM
Mary, that is a brilliant comment. People need to get educated before they can be counted on to comment intelligently. Intelligence is something you must seek as an individual to increase your understanding of our people, and our world as well as others. Sadly, a bag of potato chips is of more interest than learning to most who comment on these boards.. Those to whom Survivor is a wonderful hour of television will themselves not survive what the future has in store for us all. But thank Heaven for that. Maybe it will clean up the gene pool for the rest of us.

It never ceases to amaze me just how ignorant the average American really is. I’ll bet none of them would have complained if that $79 mil was spent on a new NASCAR track in their county. This is what we get for “no child left behind.” Eventually you have an entire generation of adults who never got ahead.

Now I bet if they found a big vein of gold on the moon – these people would be lining up to buy “stock” in NASA.

We can endlessly pump billions & billions into a socialist civilization going nowhere full of bloated overweight cry babies or we can work towards getting off of this rock and find other safe places to live in the galaxy; for children of the future. I will work towards a future where some day children can leave the BS of this earth behind; likely for much better places.

Water on the moon??? why?? why waste tax dollars for that.

Unfortunately NASA missions are planned (including funding) years and years in advance. Not doing the mission wouldn’t actually free up money to go to people out of work – the government budget simply doesn’t work that way.
Just because the mission happened during a terrible recession doesn’t mean it’s connected with the recession, nor does it mean necessarily that it shouldn’t happen.
Also, as someone pointed out, space missions do provide jobs and have resulted in some important technological breakthroughs (like freeze-dried ice cream! Just kidding). I don’t necessarily defend this particular experiment, but generally speaking this type of thing is actually important, and the NASA budget is tiny compared to what we spend on things like defense and entitlement programs, where there is tons more waste of money, in my opinion.

If your blogging today, or talking on
your cell phone or microvwaving your
Hotpocket, you owe it all to the space
program. The Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria cost a lot of money in 1492, but
no one should say that there were starving Spaniards that should have been
helped by that wasted trip to the New
World. It’s just a sad notion that
many people have that want to change
outcomes to their own limited insights.
“Jim” wants the 79 mil for the impoverished people….OK Jim, you get to choose which people you help and which people go hungry, do you want that
responsibility? Then when that runs out
what do you do? And how do you know what God intended for the Moon…You don’t know…if your honest, that is.

Amazing how ignorant many of the comments here are… Every dollar spent on a space mission is money put back into the economy through JOBS. We need to develope space travel because someday something will happen and most people on earth will be dead. Either from a natural disaster or more likely some biological accident. Frequent travel by so many people means outbreaks aren’t limited to certain countries or regions anymore… Banning bio-research on earth would be a good idea… We all share the same air and water supply here…. We need to get out into space to ensure survival of our species…

For all those folks who think going to the moon was a spacewalk for NASA, guess again. Going to space was a matter of national pride and beating the Russians. The amount of money being spent still had to be justified. In order to grease Congress palms, NASA was forced to buy from suppliers and contractors in all 50 states. Talk about waste!

AND NOT ONLY THAT, BUT AT WHAT GRADEANT WAS THE LANDING {CRASH} SITE

sure spending money on space exploration is great, but guess what mary saint (you “genius”) spending money on helping people on earth is BETTER!

weres the water going?