The purpose of the MTV Newsroom blog is to take you behind the scenes of the goings-on here at MTV News and to provide a slanted look at some of the more unusual stories that come out of the worlds of music, movies and celebrity. But occasionally, it veers off into a fixation on space travel. So we're more than a little interested today in NASA's plan to crash two spacecraft into the surface of the moon on a hunt for water. When news first broke about a "moon bombing," it seemed as though the folks at mission control had lost it, but the idea of doing this level of unmanned exploration is pretty brilliant.
However, NASA certainly didn't think up the concept of crashing something into the moon's surface — Billy Corgan thought of it first.
Okay, so Corgan actually borrowed the concept of the video for Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight" (a Video of the Year winner at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards) from pioneering French silent film director Georges Méliès' movie "A Trip to the Moon." The story follows two turn-of-the-century explorers on a dreamy excursion to the surface of the moon (as well as the bottom of the sea). In their escape from the planet (and it's acrobatic and threatening inhabitants), their craft ends up stuck and embedded in its crust (which, as you can see from the closing shot, doesn't make the moon very happy at all). "Tonight, Tonight" is a fantasy, but it's incredible how close reality sometimes catches up with some of humanity's wildest dreams.