All the way to the Moon, Mars and beyond

Since Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space in 1961, our nation has sent men to walk on the Moon, robots to chart the surface of Mars, and spacecraft to explore the far reaches of the universe. Driven by a spirit of exploration and discovery, the developments of the past few weeks remind us of the breadth and scope of our space program.

And it's about time. I've been at NASA for a little over 10 years now and many of the projects ("lets look at the Earth from space") that they do should not be done. Satellites are old technology. It's about time that NASA get back into leading edge technology, which will be needed for this kind of thing.

Now NASA just has to get rid of the "diversity is our number one value" thing or it's doomed from the start. Put the best on the projects, and quit focusing on the people with the most minority points.

Kay Baily Hutchinson is going to have a hard time selling her Texas assets to the like of the Hildabeast. I know they have lunch together a few times a month. I believe Cornell Univ confirmed just last year that there is no ice on the south pole of the moon.

We can't venture into space without H20 (and plenty of it). How we get the water into space is the $64K challenge.

Actually, the word is still out as to ice on the moon.

"Lunar Prospector found quantities of hydrogen at both the north and south lunar poles. That finding seemed to back data gleaned a few years earlier by the U.S. Pentagon’s Clementine Moon probe. Scientists on the project contend that Clementine revealed the presence of ice at the bottom of a permanently shadowed crater near the Moon's south pole.

"Until we go down on the surface, so to speak, and get absolute confirmation, we can only say that Lunar Prospector found large amounts of hydrogen on the Moon," Binder said.

"It’s totally irrelevant what form the hydrogen is in…whether it’s solar wind implanted hydrogen or whether it is water. We just have to know what equipment to take. That’s because you harvest solar wind hydrogen one way and you harvest the water ice another way. It’s still good news," Binder explained.

"In both cases, it’s the hydrogen that is the valuable thing," Binder concluded, "because there’s plenty of oxygen around. We know that you can crack the rocks and get the metal and oxygen out." <-- Extracted from Space.com regarding the Lunar lander.

Either way, until we actually go and look, we won't know, but as long as there's hydrogen and oxygen to be found, we're good.

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