Low Budget Lunar Exploration
This is an interesting Science Now segment from the PBS series Nova on doing unmanned lunar exploration on a low budget. It shows how a team working on the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) used every day items to create a payload experiment that would look for traces of water on the moon.
On one hand I’m happy to see engineers turning problems into solutions, but to me this also illustrates the two biggest issues for NASA: They’re spread too thin and they should have a much higher budget. And of course I’d rather see them embrace manned space exploration, unless one is sending a space probe to edge of the solar system.