• Maurice R. Greenberg, the impossibly geriatric former head of AIG, has been quietly luring young, unsuspecting insurance execs to his new firm. [New York Times]
• Harry Reid promised out loud that the new health care bill will have a public option, which means it actually might! [Washington Post]
• Like half an hour ago, NASA sent the the largest rocket ever (327 ft.) into space. The moon was unharmed. [CNN]
• Starting nowish, a Senate committee will meet for the next three days in order to figure out some tenable clean energy initiatives. It’s bipartisan, because look: Lamar Alexander! [Reuters]
• Over the last three days, 700 adults were arrested in sweeping sex-with-children raids that spanned 36 cities. [Los Angeles Times]
• The Somali pirates not only continue to exist if everyone pretty much ignores them, they also apparently continue to kidnap British people. [Times Online]

Just as the President of the United States was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, one of his country’s famous agencies was bombing the hell out of an innocent rock that orbits our planet, “to find water.” Here is the command center, broadcasting live from a local middle school’s AV room, just after the bombing. Some were excited, but others were LEFT HANGING. Bro what’s up with that? [YouTube]

HEY YOU GUYS: Please DO NOT FORGET to say “goodbye forever” to the moon tonight. Tomorrow at like six in the morning NASA will bomb it to death. Recall the moon’s distinguished history: It has orbited around our planet, America, for the last ~2009 years, when Jesus Christ gifted all the celestial bodies, which he wrapped with the Constitution, to Thomas Jefferson & Ronald Reagan in Center City. Since then it has been everyone’s favorite. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

Barack Obama had a cosmology-themed children’s gala on his lawn last night, wherein he invited 150 local middle schoolers to come over and check out his bitchin telescopes, but not in a braggy way. Buzz Aldrin and Sally Ride were there too! Obama said some Obama-y things about how kids can become scientists; NASA was tangentially involved and somehow neither devolved into histrionics nor launched a missile at Earth’s moon, the Moon. It was, unarguably, the single most successful event to take place at the White House during our time or any other. [The Swamp]

• This new tax credit thing for businesses that make up new jobs is not entirely despised by everyone in Congress. Even Eric Cantor is like, whatever! [New York Times]
• But speaking of “entirely despised by everyone in Congress”: Obama’s Afghanistan strategy. [Washington Post]
• NASA has discovered an enormous invisible (?) ring around Saturn that’s the size of 1 billion Earths. Next step will be for them to make the case for why we need to blow it up. [CNN]
• The Taliban in Afghanistan say they have no interest in killing Westerners. Swear to god you guys! [Reuters]
• The Supreme Court will now decide whether YouTube videos of animal cruelty count as free speech or whether they should be banned forever. [WSJ]
• And two more Americas (+ 1 Israeli) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for something about ribosomes, which sounds suspiciously like that thing the Medicine people did. [LA Times]

It’s not Iran, but the Washington Post editorial board should be pleased to know that we’re bombing the dickens out of something: “NASA’s going for full impact Friday, firing a bomb-laden missile at the moon in a dramatic search for water. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is sending its Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) on a mission to fire a missile into the south pole of the moon as twice the speed of a bullet.” MORE »

Back in spring, Obama set up a special advisory science panel of scientists to find out exactly how cool it would be for NASA to send astronauts into space, like to Mars maybe. The panel’s findings indicate that this would be “pretty fucking cool,” or “quite brilliant, really” in metric units. Fantastiche! NASA will now be needing $3 billion a year on top of the $18 billion a year it already gets so it can send a guy or a clever monkey with a touching and uncanny capacity for human emotion to Mars. MORE »

Tipster “TJBeck” sends us this NASA Earth Observatory “Image of the Day” of Alaska, which is completely on fire. How very “Saddam Hussein” of an exit, Sarah Palin! And nice touch with the targeted scorching of “Little Black One.” [NASA]

NOW GO MAKE BEAUTIFUL SPACE BABIES: The two non-diapered members of the Astronaut Love Triangle have gotten engaged, while the nappied hypotenuse awaits her December trial. This is the most important news in the history of space exploration, aside from that time NASA filmed the fake moon landing at an abandoned Encino drive-in. Congratulations to the happy couple, Bill Oefelein and Colleen Shipman, who now live in Alaska. [Reliable Source]

Our new president has some pretty messed up priorities, hoo boy! Did you notice that during his first 100 days in office he ended the recession and shook hands with tin-pot dictators and even got himself a fancy purebred dog, but did not have the time or the inclination to designate, say, a NASA administrator? This is the number one thing an incoming president is supposed to declare, no later than 5-10 minutes after taking the oath of office, and if he does not, then the world folds in on itself and time runs backwards. TRUE STORY. [True/Slant via Ben Smith]

Today was supposed to be an exciting day for science as NASA planned to launch its “Orbiting Carbon Observatory,” a fancy new Space Machine that would study carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and calculate the exact moment when Earth will die, from heat. The $273.4 million, 972-pound monster “carried a single three-channel spectrometer to make its detailed measurements and was slated to launch into a near-polar, sun-synchronous orbit that would fly about 438 miles (705 kilometers) above Earth.” Well, it blew up right after launch, so global warming still does not exist. MORE »