Richard Nixon to Major Tom...

I came across this gem entirely by chance. Sort of. Actually, I stumbled across a link at Transbuddha, which is a fine, fine resource for those of us who find ourselves in need of a few extra minutes of entertainment on workdays. This is the sort of new nugget that seems incredibly surreal-- until you think about it, and then it makes perfect sense from a pragmatic point of view.

Though the July 1969 mission proved a success, President Richard Nixon's aides devised a contingency plan in case astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (and their lunar module) were somehow stranded on the moon. In the below memo, drafted two days before the Eagle landed, aide William Safire provided Nixon with a short speech to be delivered "In Event of Moon Disaster." After making condolence calls to the "widows-to-be," Nixon would have said, "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace."

So take a super-high moonjump over to their site and check out Nixon's moon disaster speeches.