"Wake Up! They're about to Nuke the Moon!"

Those were the exact words Joyce spoke this morning. I'd like to say I'm so wise that I immediately thought to myself: Now Bob, there's no need to correct Joyce by saying: "No, my love. The rocket that's going to hit the moon this morning doesn't have a nuclear warhead." But the truth is, as I slowly emerged from my deep slumber, the only thought that passed through my head was: Nuke the moon? Kewl!

Now that my morning fog has lifted, it occurs to me that slamming a rocket into a luckless crater near the moon's south pole would have been a major media event back when I was a grade-schooler in the early sixties. I remember well Alan Shepard's sub-orbital flight, which lasted a whopping fifteen minutes (more or less) -- compelling us third-graders to gather around a radio in the school auditorium and listen to engineers and test pilots shouting "Roger that!" at each other over a steady roar of static. Nah, we weren't the least bit bothered by the lack of any cool pictures being beamed back from outer space. After all, George Lucas was probably among this throng of kids gathered around America's school radios, so back in those pre-Star-Wars days our special-effects expectations were pretty low. As we hunkered around our new-fangled "transistors" (seeing only the tension on our teachers' faces), we had to use our imaginations to visualize the wild ride Colonel Shepard was taking. But our imaginations weren't limited to the trajectory of Freedom 7. With each break in the static, we were also picturing all the soon-to-be discovered alien monsters who lived on exotic card-board-walled worlds -- claymation monsters who were very likely lurking behind that huge papier mache boulder right over there. Space was truly magical back in 1961.

But this morning (after Joyce's announcement that the moon is under nuclear attack) I got up, did my bathroom ritual, wandered into the kitchen to refresh my mug (which Joyce had lovingly delivered earlier), then stood behind Joyce at her computer and watched the live-stream moon craters growing larger. The image froze. Then some tech guy at JPL heralded the impact with the words "Thermal signature!" I kissed my wife goodbye, stepped out into a steady downpour, got into my Jap car and turned on the radio, just in time to hear Vic Ratner patiently explaining that the moon is way too massive to be knocked out of its orbit by something the size of an SUV. Still the local radio host kept insisting: "But what if something had gone wrong? Isn't there some danger we could damage the moon?" I thought Vic Ratner was very nice not to answer: "O Lord, what was I thinking? You're right! ... If we keep this up, we could end up with a moon that's just covered with craters!"

But I also thought to myself: Gee, the future sure ain't what it used to be.