Nasa is to rotate the moon through 180°. ‘We are doing this for entirely scientific reasons,” said Nasa senior director, Dr Lytton J Vasselberg, ‘but there will be certain aesthetic advantages as well.”
Scheduled to begin in June 2007, the process of rotating Earth’s satellite through 180° will involve a series of 1 400 2 000-megaton nuclear explosions, set at strategic points on the moon’s equator. When detonated in a tightly computer-controlled sequence, the explosions will act as something called ‘forcing an oscillation in resonance” and will have the effect of applying a force in one direction. ‘Like Newton’s seventh law of motion,” explained Vasselberg, ‘or to put it in layman’s terms, like the top-spin applied by tennis players.”
Unlike the Earth, the moon does not rotate. The explosions will overcome this inertia and, as a result of the extreme forces on its surface exerted by the nuclear devices, the moon will begin to rotate, extremely slowly, at a predicted rate of just less than a degree a month. It will take about 20 months to rotate through 180°. As this position is reached, another series of nuclear devices will be detonated to settle the moon back to being non-rotational.
‘There will be a totally new face to the moon hanging in our skies,” said an enthusiastic Vasselberg. ‘The face we have known and loved will be facing out into space and I expect our poets and songwriters to have a field day composing beautiful new words about what they will see. I predict a flood of new nursery rhymes, love songs and greeting cards. Now we will have a truly ‘new moon’.”
Asked what scientific benefit would be gained from turning the moon around, Vasselberg said the benefits were ‘too numerous to detail”. But one of the most important was that the turning would demonstrate the breadth and imagination of the United States’s programme towards understanding the origins of the universe.
‘It will take 2 800 big bangs to show us something about the original big bang,” jested Vasselberg. ‘For similar reasons, last June Nasa showed an astonished world that it was quite capable of attacking and badly damaging a smallish and quite innocent comet passing 80-million miles [128-million kilometres] away from Cape Kennedy. The world has to be shown, once and for all, that Nasa is the sole owner and supervisor of our solar system.”
Some medical authorities have expressed doubts about other possible effects of the moon being turned around. The Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (RCOG) has issued a statement saying that interfering with the moon could well have deleterious and possibly life-threatening effects on female menstrual cycles which ‘are closely associated with the normal waxing and waning of the moon”. The RCOG statement fears there is no apparent guarantee that the obverse face of the moon would have the same effect on women’s urogenital functions as the traditional one.
Other apprehension has been voiced by leading meteorologists who believe that the effect of the moon on the Earth’s tides could be affected by its rotation. They also claim that Nasa has neither fully investigated nor put in place safety measures, should the nuclear explosion actually knock the moon out of its Earthly orbit.
‘What if they over-calculate and realign the moon’s orbit a few thousand miles further away?” expostulated Dr Jennifer Wilting-Cockburn of the North Carolina Weather Sciences and Digital Forecast Research Centre. ‘Our tides would all but disappear. If they knocked the moon’s orbit closer to Earth, we could have devastating world-wide tsunamis. The whole thing is being dashed off without sufficient safety measures against the greater consequences.”
The most vehement criticism of Nasa’s intentions has come from religious bodies. ‘It is stupefying that Nasa, a man-made and man-managed organisation, has the incredible arrogance to tamper with God’s handiwork,” said an outraged Reverend Daniel Sockton of the First Church of Christ Dentist. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Left-Reverend Dr Basil Hullfin, has expressed his church’s ‘extreme skepticism” at Nasa’s plan. The Vatican did not respond to several requests for comment.
Vasselberg dismissed most of this criticism and comment as ‘what we at Nasa have come to expect from those who do not have our scientific compass and vision. They said exactly the same sort of things when a faulty fuel gauge delayed a space shuttle launch by only three weeks.”
The cost of the moon turning is estimated to be in the region of $278-billion (R1 807-trillion) and has received initial approval from the American Congress. —