To the moon, Alice!

[Ghoulish Delight]

Anyone catch the Mythbusters lunar landing episode yesterday?

They busted a few of the most common conspiracy theory claims. Nothing amazing, all stuff you can find refutations of online easily. But it was good to see them actually do it.

Of course, using NASA equipment to support the veracity of something that NASA is supposedly lying about isn't likely to appease many conspiracy theorists, but that's another story.

What I love is that the one that I see pop up most often, the "how can the flag be waving with no atmosphere!" turns out to be all but definitive proof that it DID happen. Turns out, the flag is MORE likely to wave with no atmosphere since, without air resistance against the surface of the flag, it oscillates back and forth much more easily. Hah!

It was also great to see what a HUGE moon-landing/NASA geek Adam Savage is. Major geek, he was in freaking heaven.

But the real takeaway was the discovery that the Zero-G airplane thingy doesn't do only weightless. They also do moon gravity. That had me WAY more excited than weightlessness. The thought that I'd get to feel what it's like to walk at 1/6th gravity? OMG that's so freaking awesome!! And I was shocked to learn that it only costs $5000. $5K. I'm not going to go out any time soon and do it, but that's bloody attainable! I could put moon gravity on my Discover Card.

And with Virgin Galactic set to debut at a mere $200K, it became suddenly very clear to me last night that there is a shockingly good chance that I will make it into orbit in my lifetime. Without a shadow of a doubt, the moment the ability to get into space is priced to where it's equivalent to a slightly spendy vacation, I'm there. $200K is well out of that range, but not so far out that I can't imagine it dropping into that range in short order.

So freaking exciting.