SRK gets moon on birthday

Every year on his birthday, an ardent Shah Rukh Khan fan buys a piece of the moon (you heard that right!) and sends it to him.

SRK confirms, "Yes, an Australian lady buys a little land on the moon for me every year on my birthday. She has been buying it for a while now and I get these certificates from the Lunar Republic Society."

SRK adds that he has met his fan and she keeps in touch with him all year through mails, "She writes me colourful emails (in the sense one line is red, one is blue and so on). I feel blessed to have the love of so many people worldwide."

According to one online lunar real estate agency, http://www.lunarregistry.com/, the Sea of Tranquility is the most sought-after address on the moon. 1 acre (approximately 43,560 sq ft, or 4,047 sq mtrs) costs US $37.50 (Rs 1758.75) and the actor owns several acres there. An ownership package includes a beautifully engraved parchment deed, a satellite photograph of the property and an information sheet detailing the geography of your region. An interactive Full Moon Atlas on CD-ROM is available at an additional cost.

You are allowed to purchase up to 40 acres per transaction. The proceeds from the purchase of the plot on the moon, go toward the Lunar Republic Society's program for privatised human-based exploration, settlement and development of the Moon.

Now while there are many websites on the internet (based in the US, UK and Russia) that allows you to buy land on the moon, it doesn't mean you can charge NASA or other space agencies for trespassing when they land on your property.

Property ownership is permanently registered by the International Lunar Lands Registry in its annual publication, which is copyrighted and deposited in the United States Library of Congress and with international patent and trademark offices, including the United Kingdom (UK Patent Office), Japan (Japan Copyright Office), Russia (Rospatent) and with the United Nations (UN Depository Library), in compliance with the Berne Convention.

Water on the Moon: What Does It Mean for the Human Species?

We've found water on the moon! This is one of the most important things ever, it could change the course of the next stage of humanity, and it makes the fact that "Dancing With The Stars" still has fifteen times the Google search volume is almost terminally depressing factor. Until you realize it's just another reason to get off-world as soon as possible.

The extraplanetary oasis-ness was triple-confirmed by Cassini, the Chandrayaan-1 probe, and a few special guest scans by the Deep Impact system on its way to slam into a moving comet - if satellites could be superstars, this would have been a red-carpet event. Each detected the unmistakable spectroscopic signatures of oxygen and hydrogen combinations, meaning that water (H20) or hydroxyl (OH) is definitely up there. Even more interesting it has "weather" variations - more of it near the poles, and it moves around depending on daylight.

This is major moonbase news, as water is the single most difficult component of any manned space mission. The life-giving liquid has a thousand and one applications other than simply "preventing astronauts dying of thirst" - it's just as essential for machinery as for mankind. Air can be compressed, and we require far less food (by volume), so the crippling cost of any off-Earth endeavour is carrying the liquids - fuel and water. The more of either stuff we can find anywhere the better. Plans for lunar living have so far been based on polar craters, where we suspect deposits of ice remain frozen in shadow (and we'll know for sure shortly when the LCROSS mission blows one of them up to check - informative and awesome) and the idea of endless fields of fluid-harvesting are the stuff of science-fiction. Which now happen to be true.

The polar plan won't be changed by the news that there's water all over because it's spread out very thinly - about one kilo of water per tonne of lunar topsoil. But there are many, many tonnes of topsoil, an unimaginable bounty of H20 just waiting to be farmed once we work out how. Mark your calendars: that's when you'll hear the most idiotic conservation protesters ever to exist.

You heard it here first: People will protest our evil mining of a dead dusty rock to expand the frontiers of human knowledge, in fact the actual frontiers of where humans are, and it will be hilarious, and they will fail because the sort of people who grow dreadlocks and protest progress are very rarely in a position to influence the space program. Besides, astronauts have gone far further in the field of water conservation than any whining hippie. When you can piss into a machine, watch it for a while and drink the result you automatically win any environmental argument.

We'd like to conclude our discussion of this breakthrough with one final statement: Water on the moon, for god's sake!

The images above show a very young lunar crater on the side of the moon that faces away from Earth, as viewed by NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper on the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft.