Photo courtesy the Newseum.I think NASA would agree with me when I say, had I known the LCROSS mission — which impacted the Moon early Friday morning — was the mission that the mainstream media would finally report on en masse, getting it so unbelievably twisted in the process, I would have tried to explain the details of the mission much more clearly in the weeks leading up to it. Which isn’t to say the coverage and the subsequent opinions by empty-headed followers hasn’t been hilarious.
The Washington, D.C. Examiner.com gets high-marks for two wild posts; first, pontificating with no evidence that it was a test of “Star Wars” technology, and then this offering, which blows up the totally inaccurate information that this was some huge “bombing,” then pouts because there was no big, exciting explosion (only adding at the end of the “bomb bomb bomb” tirade: “Keep in mind that the bomb was more an impact than an actual bomb.” Indeed, would you?). Cable news stations — though we give CNN credit for one interview with Our Hero, Bill Nye the Science Guy — and countless newspapers and web sites all had similar “Moon bombing” stories. But it was the Huffington Post’s Amy Ephron we can probably draw all these lines back to. Her article (labeled under “comedy,” though it’s not clear if that was her designation or her editor’s) and call to arms with the creation of a Twitter feed called Help Save the Moon can only be summed up, even as a joke, by this comment: “No wonder our educational system is the laughing stock of much of the civilized world.”
All of this led to Full-On Crazy, including a short-lived Twitter trending topic on “Dear NASA,” as in, “Dear Nasa, WHAT THE HELL IS WR0NG WITH Y0U?? D0 Y0U N0T N0 THE M00N IS G0D CREATI0N Y0U NEED T00 WATCH IT ((SERI0USLY)).” The irony is that all this was happening the same week President Obama gave a passionate speech on the need for science education at the White House Star Party (highly recommended viewing). One would hope that none of this would have happened if it weren’t for the deplorable lack of science writers and editors in the mainstream media. Even poor Bill Nye could only explain the the Crazy by throwing his hands up and saying, “Well, it just shows you that I failed.”
If you heard the media going on and on about “bombing” the Moon and thought, “What the hell?,” I hope you took a second to use our friend Google or ask a science-minded friend about it. One thing about us science geeks: we love it when you ask us questions! We don’t expect every person to follow every detail of our space program, but we do expect you to ask before you run off half-cocked with misinformed opinions about it. So while in retrospect, this should have been in last week’s column, I now give you:
Eight Facts About LCROSS
1. LCROSS was a mission to discover hydrogen (i.e. water) on the Moon.
