headlines of the day

Here's one for the file of What Does Any Of This Even Mean headline-parsing challenges:

In order to have any chance of understanding that one you have to realise that it's a sort of ironic callback to this actual headline from a few days earlier:

This one actually refers to a real story whereby the Beresheet lander, operated by the Israeli SpaceIL organisation, crash-landed on the moon after its main engine failed at a crucial point during the descent - the point where it needed to fire to slow the craft down and prevent it crashing, basically. That was back in April but it has only recently emerged that the craft was carrying a scientific payload that included dehydrated tardigrades. These little guys, while known by some endearingly cutesy names such as "water bears" and "moss piglets", are in fact some of the baddest motherfuckers in the animal kingdom, being able to survive extremes of temperature (at either end of the scale), massive doses of radiation and exposure to the vacuum of space. So there's every chance they could survive on the moon's surface, though whether they'd ever be able to emerge from their dormant state and actually do anything (like eat or breed) is a different question. You can imagine that if they could it would be a short evolutionary journey to actual grizzly-sized solar-powered angry space bears, which might make future human trips to the moon dangerous for a whole host of completely new reasons. I should add that my knowledge of tardigrades, and all aspects of the animal kingdom, is greatly enhanced by watching Octonauts, just as my knowledge of world geography and landmarks of significance is greatly enhanced by watching Go Jetters.

Anyway, the reason for the second headline (chronologically speaking, first in its position within this post: do try to keep up) is that there is a school of thought which says: meh, there was probably some bio-contamination already on the moon anyway from long-ago asteroid impacts on Earth. I guess one has to also allow the possibility that some biological matter was attached to the spacecraft and humans that visited the moon during the previous round of manned exploration between 1969 and 1972 and various unmanned missions thereafter.