Blowing Up the Moon is SO 1955

I love a good deceptive or exploitative headline, especially when they cover space exploration. Because let's face it, as fascinating as the search for exoplanets and water on Mars may be to you and me, the average reader out there needs a little push to get them involved in the story.

So the bloggers and editors out there tend to let fly with the overstatements and anthropomorphisms, personifying the cosmos like a mad god. That's not just a neutron star absorbing material from a nearby star -- clearly this is a case of (drum roll) "Cannibalism in space!" And which would Joe Internet Surfer be more likely to click on, a story about co-orbiting supermassive black holes or a pair of "black holes in an orbital dance." Oh for cuteness sake.

Even the most revered publications and space organizations are guilty of this from time to time, and I've dirtied my hands on an exploitative blog title or two in my time, so I don't mean to judge. But when news made the rounds that NASA was about to crash its Lunar Crater and Observation Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) into the moon, boy how the headlines flew.

This wasn't just a search for lunar water, this was a "galactic smackdown," a "Kamikaze moon mission" and a "moon bombing." Oh, and in the words of Fox News' Neil Cavuto, "This isn't about going lunar. This is just loony!" Cavuto, you joker...

Everyone got a lot of mileage out of the sensational aspects of the story, yet I was surprised that everyone wasn't all over the fact that we'd actually made plans to detonate a nuclear bomb on the surface of the moon in the 1950s. What's more, a young Carl Sagan was part of the research team. According to Space.com, the United States Air Force called it Project A 119.

Had this plan actually come to fruition, it would have seen an atomic blast launch a giant dust cloud (and possibly organic matter) into space. Then, according to Scientific American, a second rocket could have flown through to collect samples.

I can't even imagine how Cavuto might have reacted to that.

Image: Clearly this is not the LCROSS impact the headlines promised us. (NASA/GSFC/UCLA)