Colonize the moon? Are we crazy?

Last week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration slammed a probe deep into the dark side of the moon to kick up tons of dust high into the sky — oh, sorry, there’s no sky on the moon. Um, high into the air. No, wait, there’s no air on the moon. Well, high into the something.

Anyway ... the dust particles were to be analyzed by NASA’s $504 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to check for ice. Total cost of the mission to crash the so-called “kamikaze rocket” into the moon: $79 million, according to CNET News. Total cost of developing the Atlas V rocket that propelled the LRO to the moon: $1.6 billion.
And we wonder why America’s going broke.

Yes, folks, we sent a probe into space to figure out whether the moon — that dusty, pockmarked, lifeless orb that circles our beautiful blue Earth — has some semblance of potentially life-sustaining water.
Here’s how William Harwood, who writes The Space Shot column for CNET News, described initial data from the experiment: “Spectroscopic data indicated the presence of material of some sort above or near the impact point in a murky crater known as Cabeus, and instruments aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter observed the Centaur crater and confirmed a plume of debris. But it was not immediately clear how extensive the plume was or how much material was blasted out.”

In regard to the experiment, NASA investigator Anthony Colaprete reportedly told the media, “Life is full of surprises; we want to be careful and not make a false negative or a false positive claim. I’m excited we saw variations in the spectra because that means we saw something, and it was not just blackness.”

How nice, it wasn’t just blackness. There was something there. Not necessarily ice. But there was something. Duh?