The joke used to be that Princeton’s (nonexistent) law school had the best program in space law. Of course, the final frontier of international law is no longer trivial, the weaponization of space being a serious issue whenever there aren’t any other serious issues to talk about.
Artist's rendering of impact.
However, things took a frightening turn for the worse tonight. The NASA Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) made impact a few hours ago, for the ostensible purpose of finding water on the Moon. The first component of the LCROSS spacecraft struck the Moon at a velocity of over 6,000 miles per hour, with a mass of nearly 5,000 pounds. By my calculations, this translates to a kinetic energy equivalent to two tons of TNT. This would explain the sixty-six foot crater. To any reasonable observer, this is a boldly aggressive move on the part of our bespectacled, narrow-cravatted men in white.
According to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, to which the United States is a signatory, “The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden.” Imagine if North Korea had launched a “satellite” at the moon for “scientific purposes.” There would be an outcry. Apparently, whoever runs the show down here runs the show up there.
It’s not really weapons testing, since there’s nothing groundbreaking (npi) about the explosive charges themselves, or their methods of delivery.
I really believe they’re just looking for ice.
This is all a brazen attempt to provoke war with lunar life forms.
Dan, know you nothing of the Lunar War of ’69? The moon landing WAS a hoax, but only in that neither Buzz Aldrin nor Neil Armstrong actually returned to Earth. Instead, they spent three months on the moon, systematically exterminating all lunar beings before ritually committing suicide by taking off their helmets and engaging in space’s first make-out session. Understandably, due to the genocidal (not to mention homosexual) nature of these two brave astronauts’ actions, the truth was never revealed…until now.
One small step for a man, one giant leap for erotic asphyxiation.
I heard the government is just practicing to blow up the moon, because if we blew up the moon we wouldn’t have to worry about floods or severe weather, or climate change any more.