So now we are DELIBERATELY crashing space probes into the Moon???!

I'm angry.

I was just flipping through the paper here because I'm not working on anything at the moment, and I saw a very brief news story about NASA launching a pair of probes to the Moon yesterday. Its the first Moon launch in decades.

So I did a little more looking.

Besides the obvious issue of a huge mis-placement of government money (that is to say, our money) on a completely unnecessary project, the bigger problem is that apparently, as the AP reported, "The mission is a first step in NASA's effort to return humans to the moon by 2020."

Really?? Really?! We're still planning on going back to the Moon? With all the money the government has thrown away on stuff lately, you would think they would have cut out something like that, which is not only impractical but also scientifically pointless.

But the bigger issue, and the one that really gets me angry, is the mission objective for one of the probes that was launched yesterday. Read it for yourself:

"The other will swing past the moon and go into an elongated orbit around Earth that will put it on course to crash into a crater at the moon's south pole in October."

So after years of accidentally slamming probes into the side of the Moon, and Mars, apparently NASA has decided to just do away with the pretense and deliberately smash millions of taxpayer dollars into that giant ball of cheese in the sky.

The impact is supposedly to look for water under the surface, but I'm pretty sure the guys at NASA just got bored and wanted to blow something up.

If you need any proof these guys are completely out of touch with reality, just read some of the quotes in the story - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090618/ap_on_sc/us_sci_moon_rocket