“It’s not the same around NASA anymore: budget cuts, the end of the shuttle. What are we going to do for fun?”
“Well, we still have all that Hubble data we can analyze. No one’s looked at that pass we did on the zD1 galaxy yet. That light is almost thirteen billion years old.”
“Nah, I wanna do something now, something big and bold; not old.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t have the budget for ‘big’ or ‘bold.’ ‘Old’ we might do.”
“Well, something close in then.”
“Shuttle Group has all the orbital stuff.”
“Okay, the moon. That’s close. What can we do with the moon?”
“We already orbited and landed there; brought back rocks; four-wheeled around; played golf. What’s left?”
“We could dig a hole. The Mars guys did that and it got some press.”
“C’mon guys: ‘dig a hole?’ Is that all we can come up with?”
“Beats tipping cows.”
“’Tipping cows?’ How long were you stationed in Houston anyway?”
“Guys, let’s get back on this. We gotta think big, like a big blast.”
“Hey, we could detonate a nuke like they did in the movie with that asteroid.”
“Excuse me? Nukes are bad, in case you guys hadn’t noticed. Radiation from the blast emits alpha rays, beta rays, gamma rays, not to mention panic and political unrest. Need I go on?”
“Geez. Women always get so rational; takes the fun out of things. Okay, thank you for that politically correct assessment.”
“What then? Something smaller than a nuclear device.”
“And not too expensive.”
“That will go boom.”
“Hmm.”
“Well, we could just launch a rocket and blast it into the surface of the moon. That would make a pretty big splash.”
“Hey, I think you got something there. Would it be big enough?”
“Big enough for what? The blast material would rise maybe thirty thousand feet up. With sunlight filtering through, it could make for some cool visuals!”
“How about a one-two punch? We’ll need a couple of stages for the rocket to reach that distance. If we brought one along, we could push it ahead of the capsule. It would land a few minutes before; then we could smash the capsule in after: boom-kaboom!”
“Hey, I think we got something. There’s probably enough left in the budget for a rocket.”
“Yea, use it or lose it.”
“So we’re going to crash into the moon? Isn’t crashing bad? I thought we were supposed to land, safely and all that; maybe even take off again.”
“Nah, too expensive. Besides, you can never tell whether the fuel to get back up will work — all that solar night and day temperature variability. Better just to crash it.”
“Excuse me again, but aren’t you supposed to justify the expenditure with some scientific purpose?”
“It’s entertainment on a global scale! Isn’t that enough?”
“We have satellite TV for that.”
“No, we have world politics for that!”
“Hey, let’s focus. Entertainment isn’t technically our charter. She’s got something there. We need scientific purpose.”
“We could analyze the blast material.”
“If you wanna analyze moon rocks, go do some x-ray diffraction or CP spectrometry. We still have dozens left.”
“This would be deep stuff. There might be something different than the beach-combing stuff we picked up last time.”
“Could be water down there. This is the deep version of ‘dig a hole.’ We could dig a well!”
“There’s no water on the moon. We know that already.”
“Maybe, maybe not. You don’t know anything for sure until you go look.”
“C’mon. Don’t be stupid.”
“I might mention that looking for water, ergo potential signs of past life, is a fundable pursuit.”
“Hey, now your talkin’! Water, ho! We just got our funding!”
“I’ll start the rocket design.”
“I’ll calculate the payload and impact effects. Say, maybe we could pick up some space junk in orbit. That would give us more mass for free: no launch cost!”
“Picking up litter: another mission objective and funding purpose.”
“Tests our ability to connect precisely with orbiting vehicles too. I like it! We could get some money from the military!”
“In case you haven’t noticed, the Republicans are out of office now.”
“No matter; we have enough to go on with the water and the space junk.”
“This is going to be so cool! I’ll design some cameras and spectrometers into the capsule. We’ll only get a few minutes of data, but it’ll be great.”
“We can put it up on Youtube!”