MIT successfully bounce laser off the moon

Maybe Stanley Kubrick faked this as well? Lasers are brilliant. They can cut things. They can annoy cats. And they can really perk up any sci-fi films with a space bent. But perhaps their greatest quality is their ability to bounce off things. And the finest day in the long and exciting history of lasers bouncing off things occurred in 1962 when a team of earnest young men in slacks from MIT managed to bounce a laser off the moon.

Sadly they didn’t then use the laser to gouge a message onto its surface like ‘U R a Prat’ or ‘Oak Furnitureland’. It just bounced and came back.So what was the purpose of this other than to show off? Well, they claimed it was to measure the distance between us and out moony cousin before they sent rockets up there and stuff. But it was probably just for showing off. And this kind of technology has also revealed that the moon is actually moving away from us, escaping at a rate of 38 millimetres per year. Which is just incredibly ungrateful.