Though you may have missed it over this highly eventful weekend at Iowa State — two days during which Ames may very well have emitted more carbon and produced more horn-honking than ever before — scientists officially announced Friday that there is water on the moon.

“Indeed, yes, we found water,” said Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for NASA’s $79 million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission. “And we didn’t find just a little bit. We found a significant amount.”

Scientists made the discovery after the LCROSS satellite, traveling at 5,600 mph, slammed into a crater near the Moon’s south pole on Oct. 9, carving out a hole 80 feet wide and sending up more than 26 gallons of water.

So what does this mean?

According to some hopeful space policy prognosticators, it could mean a lot. If the water is accessible and plentiful, providing drinking water for astronauts and supplying a key ingredient for rocket fuel, NASA could likely set up a base camp on the moon to facilitate long-term exploration. Such a costly endeavor, of course, could only occur if the plan to return astronauts to the moon by 2020, scrapped this year due to the tight federal budget, is resurrected.

Hopefully, it won’t be.

As much as my grandfather will hate to hear me say it — he worked at Cape Canaveral as a mechanical engineer for Lockheed Martin for over forty years and raised me watching “The Right Stuff,” the great film about the space program’s creation — a mission to put astronauts back on the moon, as well as many other NASA missions, is not worth the price.

Yes, landing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969 was a valuable and necessary boon to our national ego and science and math education during the Cold War.

In addition, seeing space shuttles take off on television – or from the roof of grandma and grandpa’s house — is flat out cool. What’s more, space exploration in general is undeniably good for science, which seeks the furtherance of knowledge “for the sake of knowledge,” and technological development, as the space industry urges the best and brightest engineers to keep pushing the envelope.

But it’s time to get real — we need to cut back and prioritize.

We are no longer in the Cold War, and we by no means need to lead the world in space exploration. China and India are rapidly developing space programs, and it should not be considered embarrassing for the United States to work with these countries rather than stay ahead of them.

More importantly, much of the money that goes to NASA could be better spent. As stated, NASA has many of the most intelligent and forward-thinking scientists and engineers working for it.

Imagine what those minds could do to benefit areas of domestic development that our nation demands. Electric vehicles, biofuels, solar and wind power, recycling and water management … The U.S. currently lags behind most of the industrialized world in the quality and growth of these sectors. The scarcity of resources that our nation faces calls for this to change.

The best way to facilitate this change is to attract the most intelligent and innovative minds that our nation has and providing these domestic sectors with greater federal funding, while limiting funding of space exploration to projects and missions that can be proven cost-effective and beneficial to society.

Remember, taxpayers pay for what NASA and every other governmental agency does. So while the discovery of water on the moon is no doubt cool, and might very well be worth $79 million, wouldn’t finding long-term sources of energy and water in the United States be better?

It’s an idea that might be hard to swallow, but well worth it if you ask me.

– Steve Adams is a graduate student in journalism and mass communication from Annapolis, Md.