It kinda bothers me that NASA is more concerned about colunising the moon than they are about the economy, truthfully thats just my solid oppinion.

@Ave – NASA’s mission is exploration. You appear to have confused them with the Office of Management and Budget, or perhaps the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Those agencies are concerned about the economy.

It would seem to me that NASA employees and NASA’s contractors’s employees – for the most part are probably American’s that pay taxes and spend their money, further helping out our economy…

NASA’s LCROSS twin impacting spacecraft should pay for themselves by rewriting the history of the Moon and Earth. Impacting between the magma fields on the the visible surface of the Moon and most, if not all, of the Moon’s south pole – South Pole-Aitken basin (the largest crater in the solar system) gives a truer sampling of the Moon’s composition. The Apollo program sampled only within the magma fields at ~5% of our GDP.

You dont just put all your money to the needy and what have you. It’s like would you just pay one bill of your house? i think not. Plus not to be harsh or anything but we are already over populating and if everyone was healthy alive rich we would be even worse off. And we need the technology advance over other countries so were better prepared. also wat about the people working at nasa your just gonna take their jobs and funding?

To be fair and balanced -

I have yet to see anyone write of the savings of the canning of ole Roy’d (and NOAA’s Chris Landsea) to advance science and save lives and money with our extremist Republicans and Christians’ version of the ”Great Leap Forward”. “Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. … supporter of intelligent design[1] and is skeptical of the scientific consensus that human activity is primarily responsible for global warming. … has been referred to as the “official climatologist of the EIB Network” by Rush Limbaugh, who is the owner of the Excellence In Broadcasting network.[15]” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)). “Story #4: A Man’s Questions to God on Global Warming … RUSH: … a role … this doesn’t describe me, but I wish to play a role now as a confused and troubled man asking his God some things.  “Please, God … My government says manmade global warming is destroying the planet you have so generously provided. … if I do not give up my car and give in to higher taxes … the world’s oceans will boil and that we will all die. … Or do you control earth’s temperatures?  Please, God, just show me a sign.” … So a question for the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling, all-concerned Maha Rushie. … Did God give us the answer to this troubled man’s question?  … Story #5: BBC: What Happened to Global Warming? … RUSH: Let’s go to the BBC, Friday, October 9th: “‘What Happened to Global Warming?’ — … which we’ve been told by our own climate specialist, Dr. Roy Spencer. … Of course, the BBC in this story felt obligated to pretend that the warmers have an answer for all this but they really don’t. … An answer from God?  … discoveries are so many and so vast, they are hard too keep up with” (“Stack of Stuff Quick Hits Page”; Rush “LABI” Limbaugh, Rush Limbaugh; rushlimbaugh.com, 10/12/09).

It seems that on pretty much every post on space exploration gets at least one idiot post like Ave’s. I think this must be some kind of new internet law (or maybe not so new, I haven’t been here all that long).

To make it very, very simple for you Ave – it is not a zero-sum game. The vast majority of all economically profitable advances began as serendipitous discoveries made while pursuing pure basic research motivated by nothing other than curiosity.

What do you think would have happened if Ferdinand and Isabella declined to fund Christopher Columbus because of cost concerns? (Which, in fact, they very nearly did) Some other European would probably still have “discovered” the New World, but the nation reaping the economic windfall would not have been Spain. Or even more apropros, look at what really happened when Ming Dynasty China chose to stop funding the voyages of Zheng He, because of economic concerns among others. (Make no mistake, the Chinese remember and are watching this closely)

Even if it was a zero-sum game, go look up the actual budget for NASA and the actual cost of this mission, and compare it to the amount spent for one day’s worth of operations in Iraq, and then come back and tell me what policy changes would have the greatest monetary impact on the economy.

lol amphiox columbus was sent to america to discover it he had maps to get there. and the american economy will never recover because its being drained to fund a future for a select group of individuals.

Fiddler, look at the moon. It has tons of craters in it. Think of how often the moon has stuff smashing into it. I doubt that our lunar probe colliding with the moon is going to make that much of a difference. It’s not like we’re cutting it in half. Do you want answers and results from the entire solar system for celestial debris hitting the moon too?

What’s the temperature of the surface of the moon in sunlight? I’m pretty sure that it’s a good deal above the boiling point of water.

Figure then, that if (1)the moon is several billion years old, (2) there is no atmosphere to refract the sun’s rays, (3) any given surface of the moon is subjected to approximately 13-1/2 days of sunlight at a time, and (4) the gravity of the moon is too weak to hold an atmosphere and therefore has no hope of holding water vapor. . . (water ice sublimes as well, so it needn’t have necessarily boiled off), it should follow through simple reasoning that there is NO WATER ON THE MOON!

I’m with Ave on this one. It’s a colossal waste of tax payers’ money to look for water on the moon by bombarding it with rocket parts in the hopes of kicking up some dust. That being said, I wonder if that was simply the “cover story” NASA was giving when in actuality they may have been looking for something else. Goodness knows that the average American has neither the sense nor the education to think critically. Not to mention that there is little enough true science being taught in government schools for the majority of folks to think this one through.

So what, then, is NASA really up to?

The US has a long history of spending billions upon billions testing and developing new technologies, only to have those same designs duplicated and perhaps improved upon by other countries once the information is declassified and the designs seen by other governments. This isnt a criticism of other govs, its just the way it is.

The future of humanity is in space, and a discovery on the moon is quite possibly the type of thing that will drive every rival space agency and economy into a new race. I think its a bit naive to assume that NASA is going to so casually announce its findings to the public. If theres something up there to be had, you can be sure the US will take steps to make sure it will get there first, including delaying and downplaying any info it may have acquired.

Ozonator,

Pretty much the only thing the moon and Mars have in common is their age. Unlike the moon, Mars has sufficient mass to have a gravitational force strong enough to hold an atmosphere, and thus water vapor. I’m also pretty sure that the days on Mars are less than 13-1/2 of our typical 24-hour days here on the earth. And the temperature on Mars doesn’t exceed the boiling point of water.

No, the conditions on Mars and on the moon are quite different, and while my logic truly does apply equally to both, the arguments are necessarily different.

( And my faith in the American educational system remains to be strengthened, although there are some good astronomy classes available at public universities that will provide much knowledge for a diligent and worthy student.)

With thanks to blogs.discovermagazine.com for helping to advance the lunar portion of my model:

“Ozonator Says: October 15th, 2009 at 7:11 pm … Moon was squeezed dry”

several hours later – “Like a big sponge, moon absorbs charged particles to produce water” (Divya Gandhi; hindu.com, 10/17/09).

The sodium flares from the Sun and the sodium chloride in the oceans are the predominant, naturally occurring examples in the solar system including the Moon. At best in a hospice program, Hoagland is only an expert in making 99.9% of an unlucky audience feel that a minute is a year and a few hours is the rest of their lives.