Hollywood and the Moon: The Undiscovered Country?

In general, the public's mood about our moon has been "been there, done that."  The Apollo missions gave us the opportunity to explore the moon surface, bring back samples, and grab a new perspective on this beautiful planet of ours.  So what do we expect to find on the moon today?  Well, we are still interested in finding pockets of water and the origin of the moon is still somewhat of a mystery.  Is it the remnants of a collision between the earth and a Mars-size planet?  Did the earth have two moons at one time?

This month NASA launched the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) on a Delta II rocket.  GRAIL will map the gravitational field to better understand the nature of the moon and its evolution to what it is today.  This follows a number of other recent missions, such as the June 2009 launch of an Atlas 5 rocket, which allowed NASA to begin the process of locating new landing sites for future moon missions using the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, while also checking for water using the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. 


So with these past explorations and new questions, you would think we have enough science to create a few interesting stories about the moon.  Not really.  If you look at two summer movies you will see different spins on the Apollo missions, both of them pretty crazy.  First, you have Transformers:  Dark of the Moon, where the entire moon mission was to salvage an alien spacecraft from Cybertron that crash-landed on the dark side of the moon.  Then we had Apollo 18, a movie that covers the supposedly last Apollo mission designed to place sensors on the moon to detect Soviet ICBMs.  Of course, things went awfully wrong. 

Interestingly enough, NASA set up a page on Apollo 18 to comment on the film footage and the veracity of such a mission.  I am hoping this was some fun publicity and not any real concern on the part of the space program that Americans could be confused.  The NASA statement points out "There never was a DoD-dedicated Apollo mission and no astronauts named Anderson, Walker or Grey were ever selected for NASA's astronaut corps, as the movie depicts, or failed to return from the moon."  Are you convinced now?  In fact, it is odd that the film used the astronaut names Benjamin Anderson, Nathan Walker and John Grey rather than the names of the astronauts originally slated for the mission (of course, this was just a proposed rotation schedule):  Richard Gordon,Vance Brand, and Harrison Schmitt.

This makes me wonder if it is time for NASA to deny some other ideas spinning around Hollywood these days.  For instance:

--  Moon (2009):  Does NASA have plans to mine Helium-3 on the moon with clones?
-- The Dark Side of the Moon (1990):  Does the dark side of the moon have a link with the Bermuda Triangle?
-- Cat-Woman of the Moon (1953):  I think you know the question here.