This inexpensive "Frankensat" cobbled together from spare parts on a shoestring budget has less than a 50-50 chance of success but it's a great way to take advantage of an unexpected payload opportunity.

"In January 2006, after several years of development, LRO engineers decided to use a larger Atlas V to launch LRO, creating 2200 pounds of extra cargo capacity. The agency put out the word to its 10 research centers: What can you come up with to make use of that space—before the earliest LRO launch window in October 2008?

Dan Andrews, a rangy, plain-spoken Silicon Valley native with 21 years at NASA, reacted quickly to the call for proposals. He and other engineers from Ames Research Center near San Jose, Calif., formed what they called the Blue Ice team and met in an old Navy dorm, hoping to dream up a project that would probe the polar craters for water.

There was more at stake than proving water ice existed on the moon: "It was to get back in the game," Andrews says. Ames's aging wind tunnels and battleship-gray buildings in Silicon Valley, once hotbeds of aeronautical research, sit in the technological shadow of nearby Google and eBay. NASA has cut its programs and threatened it with closure. Now, Ames had a shot at retooling itself as a shop for fast, cheap missions.

Andrews had no budget for an expensive lander to seek water, and conditions in the eternally dark polar craters would kill rovers, with temperatures close to minus 300 F. Instead, Blue Ice and its partners at Northrop Grumman came up with a concept to bring the lunar floor out in the open. A bare-bones spacecraft, dubbed the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), would sit beneath the LRO atop the Atlas rocket. After launch, with the LRO safely bound for the moon, LCROSS would remain attached to the Atlas's spent upper-stage rocket, known as the Centaur. Using the moon's gravity, LCROSS would maneuver the Centaur—"like a VW steering a school bus," Andrews says—into an elongated orbit around Earth that assured a collision with one of the moon's poles."

First the Russians threaten to bomb the Poles and now us. When will it stop?