As 'paulddraper notes, doing things "to see what would happen" is a recognized research strategy that created a lot of science and technologies we enjoy today. This thinking, a childlike curiosity of sorts, is something you seek in good researchers.

As for A119, the issues with the project were entirely political. The idea of bombing the moon is a good one; it's a legitimate way of collecting scientific data in lieu of being able to deploy a drilling team on the surface, and something that's been done with non-nuclear impactors. See [0], [1], [2], and probably a bunch of other cases I don't remember today.

It's easy to say that "nukes bad humans stupid", but there are aspects to this idea - and a bunch of other so-called "peaceful uses for nuclear weapons" - that illustrated human smarts, not stupidity.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SELENE

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Impact_Probe

Does that type of aggressive research just assume that the systems being impacted are durable enough to withstand the destruction (2tons of tnt, in one of your links), or has that really been studied? I don't know the context of this, but I can't help but think of how many of the ocean's submersibles damage the ecosystem.

The Moon has some very convenient features for such research - namely, it's a big, dead rock. Hard to think up a bad thing that would happen from hitting it with a satellite, or even a bomb. We already know it receives a regular beating from the solar system, in form of meteor impacts.

I don't see one of the impact probes having as much force as a meteor, but I could see it being enough to throw off a fragile system. Yeah, its not like bombing ganymede or mars' ice-caps. I'm just curious if they are going to accidentally collapse some cave network, or give it a temporary atmosphere of dust.

Edit: thanks for the response btw

Who knows? There's always uncertainity, and a non-zero probability that the bombing site happened to have a geologically interesting cave system underneath, or a hidden cache of alien artifacts. The probability of such a thing, while non-zero, is really low, and we also don't observe fragile systems on the Moon. It's simply a dead rock.

As for bombing Mars ice caps, that was a nice idea too, IMO (even though AFAIK it turned out to not be useful). The goal here was to densify the atmosphere with water vapor and CO₂. Assuming you consider terraforming Mars a good idea, doing it in reasonable timescales will require some preparations involving direct applications of lots of energy - whether it's melting the ice caps, or redirecting comets to hit the planet. At some point we might be able to accelerate the process by deploying bacteria and plants (read: self-replicating chemical processing nanobots), but the conditions are not right for this yet - hence the ideas like using nukes or comets to bootstrap those conditions.

If a human impactor would give it an atmosphere of dust, then said atmosphere would already have been created by one of the dozens of similar-sized impactors the moon gets per year.

Incredible that revealing that would be considered a violation of national security, conceiving it should have been considered a violation of national security. The dumbasses that came up with this idea were fortunately overruled by people with a bit more sense of what the public response to such vandalism would be.

It's how we got a lot of our good inventions too.

Also half the stuff that shows up on HN.