Comment:Is there anything, anywhere, the U.S. doesn't want to blow up?

Is there anything, anywhere, that the U.S. doesn't want to blow up, litter with American junk or erect a U.S. flag?

Not content with littering the moon with debris from long forgotten space missions, U.S. flags held arrogantly aloft in a lunar landscape, and a country that thanks to the United States, now looks like a lunar landscape, the U.S. wants to blast a comet.

The NASA probe Deep Impact is to eject a 372-kilogram projectile that is scheduled to smack into comet Tempel 1 on Monday as the heavenly wanderer flies past Earth at a great distance.

The collision, occurring at 37,100 kmh could gouge a crater as big as a football stadium and spew out a mass of cometary gas and dust, eagerly recorded by telescopes, radars and spectrometer.

Scientists involved in Near Earth Objects (NEOs) - comets and asteroids that may pose a threat - say Deep Impact could yield precious data.

Oh another threat. Look out everyone, there's a comet coming - get out the duct tape!

AAP reports that the risks posed by NEOs must be put into context, for the probability of any collision is extremely remote.

A stepped-up US-led effort to scour the skies for this threat has not yielded any prospect of a hit, although several rocks could make near-misses in coming decades.

No WMD's found in Iraq. No life threatening NEOs found in the cosmos. Meanwhile, as the U.S. spends billions of dollars scouring the earth and the heavens for things that may go bang, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2003, 35.9 million people were in poverty, up 1.3 million from 2002.

Never mind, I am sure that most of these 35.9 million people, have no objection to $437 million being spent on zapping a comet. Especially as the description of the project is full of positive statements -

"may indirectly provide a windfall"
"any space rocks that could hit Earth"
"The collision, occurring at 37,100 kmh could gouge a crater...."
"Comets are believed to comprise primitive material..."
"say some experts, may hold organic molecules"
"that may have been the chemical building blocks"
"may pose a threat"
"could yield precious data"
"there might be some surprises in this mission"
"We might learn some something crucial about the structure of comets"
"that could help us in the event that we faced something like this"

The Guv'nor