HuffPo lunacy

The Huffington Post has a certain reputation for allowing (perhaps it would be more accurate to say promoting) quacks, vaccine denialists, conspiracy theorists and other superstitious wackery, but the example that follows is impressively moronic even by HuffPo standards.

As Tariq Malik at Space.com reports regarding NASA's LCROSS lunar impact (emphasis mine):

NASA's LCROSS mission will slam a spacecraft and an empty rocket stage into the moon's south pole Friday morning at 7:31 a.m. EDT (1131 GMT) in a search for water ice buried in the perpetual shadows of lunar craters.

Scientists are eagerly awaiting the LCROSS crashes and hope they'll provide a definitive answer on whether lunar water ice could be used to support future astronauts on the moon. But at least one person — novelist and screenwriter Amy Ephron — has spoken out against the $79 million mission on her Huffington Post blog and launched a Twitter campaign ("helpsavethemoon") to save the moon from future onslaught.

"I'm not a big fan of explosions, anyway. In Iraq or Afghanistan or the South Pole of the Moon. But who does have a territorial prerogative there?" Ephron wrote. "Who has jurisdiction? Who has the right to say that it's okay to blow up a crater on the moon?"

Apparently, Mother Nature does. The moon is covered in craters, with new ones like those to be created by the LCROSS probes popping up all the time by meteorites that pummel the lunar surface.

"The image of this impact, what we're doing with the moon, is something that occurs naturally four times a month on the moon, whether we're there or not," LCROSS principal investigator Tony Colaprete told reporters Thursday.

I love Malik and Colaprete's understated but effectively utter refutation of Ephron's deliberately ignorant rant. Keep it up!

Off to Mars, but not the Moon?

The summary of the Human Space Flight Review Committee report requested by the Obama administration advocates a long-term program with Mars as the long term goal (i.e. no set date), de-emphasising any return to the Moon:

... NASA has drafted a concept proposal called "Generation Mars" which envisions a 30-year blueprint for developing technologies, staging precursor missions to asteroids and other destinations, and building grassroots support for eventual human expeditions to Mars.

It also offers an unsurprising warning:

"The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources," the report summary said.

[Hat tip: TPM/Reuters]