Bang, Zoom

You like that title? It's a moon reference. It's also a reference to domestic violence (Ralph Kramden was literally threatening to punch his wife so hard that she flew into space), but we'll overlook that for now. Turns out NASA plans to have a moon base ready to receive any battered wives who might crash into the lunar surface. And what do they want to use this base for? No, it won't be some kind of lawless sex den. Instead, Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, sees the moon base as an international training and research facility similar to the stations set up around Antarctica. The goal would be to use it as a launch pad for further solar system exploration. Worden rightly extols the virtues of the current international push to land on the moon once again. For the first time in history, several countries are expressing an interest in their own moonshots, and they have the resources to make it happen. Considering the International Space Station has fostered so much cooperation between countries already, it's not hard to imagine several nations working together to put an outpost on the moon. However, the one sticking point seems to be the fact that NASA's space plans appear to be in complete shambles. The Space Shuttle program is clunking to a long overdue halt and its replacement has been pushed back further than Doc Brown ever traveled in his DeLorian. And instead of funneling money into NASA to hurry the development of new space vehicles, congress seems only willing to duct tape the Shuttle back together a few more times and tiredly fling it into orbit. Considering the success-to-failure ratio of the Shuttle, this seems to be asking for another national catastrophe. Frustration. Much frustration. More details here.