A misguided rocket streaks toward the headquarters of Seattle-based Moonshot Games last week.

SEATTLE, WA–NASA apologized today for the tragic error last Friday that led to the destruction of Moonshot Games’ new headquarters in Seattle. In what was supposed to be an historic scientific mission in which NASA hoped to crash a rocket into a moon crater to study the resulting ejecta for signs of water, a navigation glitch caused the rocket to target a Seattle area game developer just days after it opened its doors for business.

“It was one of those slips that just happen sometimes,” explained NASA’s director of lunar explosions, Marcus Droone. “It’s kind of silly when you hear the whole story. You see, when our team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was finalizing the targeting coordinates, they mistakenly used Google Earth instead of Google Moon. And since we named the operation “Moonshot”, well, you can see where there might be a bit of a mix up. Boy did we have a chuckle over that!”

The LCROSS mission was designed to search for water ice in a permanently shadowed crater at the lunar south pole one quarter of a million miles from Seattle.

“On the cosmic scale of things,” Droone explained hastily to reporters, “the earth/moon system is practically an indistinguishable point in the vastness of the universe, not that it’s any excuse, but it’s important to put such events in perspective. On the plus side, we can definitively state that Seattle has water. Apparently, the place is practically awash in the stuff.” The science team based at the Ames Research Center near Los Angeles is now considering a manned mission to the Seattle region, where they feel they could set up a semi-permanent moon base in less than 20 years.

As for the Moonshot staff, fortunately none of them were present in the office at approximately 4:30 a.m. when the rocket struck the building. Somewhat ironically, a neighbor who had set up a telescope hoping to witness the lunar impact, received the surprise of his life when the LCROSS Centaur rocket hurtled through the atmosphere like a blazing harbinger of doom and smashed into the building two blocks away, leaving behind a rubble-strewn crater measuring more than 75 feet across.

“NASA promised a spectacle, and at least for me it really paid off in turtles,” said Larry Vottman, the amateur astronomer who was knocked off his feet from the blast but seemed unharmed except for a newly acquired speech impediment that apparently causes him to complete every sentence with the word turtles.

The Moonshot team were not available for comment following the accident, although a press release issued by the company said that they were considering asking NASA to pay for the damages and maybe invite them to witness the next cool space spectacular. NASA’s Droone promised that the space agency would enlist all of its technical expertise, including a team of real, honest-to-god rocket scientists, to make double-sure next time to target the right celestial body. –Rondo Nobson