Knowtex

Here is the speech William Safire drafted for President Nixon to read in case the Apollo 11 Astronauts became stranded on the moon! It is a wonderful piece of alternate universe American history, in which Nixon had to explain to a nation that Aldrin and Armstrong were going to die on the moon...

Although three independent groups today announced the detection of water on the lunar surface, their find is at most a part per 1000 water in the outermost millimeter or two of still very dry lunar rock.

Over its ten months of operation, the Chandrayaan-1 X-ray Spectrometer (C1XS) has gathered data for a total of 30 solar flares, giving the most accurate measurements to date of magnesium, aluminium, silicon, calcium and iron in the lunar surface.

The Moon, in fact, has water in all sorts of places: not just locked up in minerals, but scattered throughout the broken-up surface, and, potentially, in blocks or sheets of ice at depth.

A glitch caused NASA's water-hunting LCROSS mission to lose more than half its fuel, but the spacecraft is still on track to collide with the moon.

Less than a month after the U.S. celebrated the 40th anniversary of its first moon landing , the country's space agency faces the dour possibility that it lacks the funds needed to be able to return there by 2020, a goal established by the Bush Administration.

Four hundred years ago our understanding of the universe changed for ever. On August 25th 1609 an Italian mathematician called Galileo Galilei demonstrated his newly constructed telescope to the merchants of Venice.

From anyplace on Earth, the clearest thing in the night sky is usually the moon. Ancient cultures revered the moon. It represented gods and goddesses in various mythologies -- the ancient Greeks called it "Artemis" and "Selene," while the Romans referred to it as "Luna."

A vast mess of frozen lava and vaporised rock has been found orbiting a nearby star, evidence of a cataclysmic collision between planet-like bodies outside our solar system. Such collisions are thought to have created Earth's moon and left other scars in the solar system.

Dr John Olson from Nasa's headquarters in Washington DC tells Andy Duckworth about the agency's plans for the moon, Mars and one-way tickets into space.