In the Beginning, God Cratered

Only half a century after Big Government sent the first human beings to the moon and brought them back safe, private enterprise still struggles to manage with robots. The Righteous State's billionaire-funded lander, named for the commencement of the Book of Genesis in order to dispel any nonsense about giant scientific leaps for all humanity, shut down its main engine too early and splattered itself across the lunar surface at five hundred kilometres an hour. The débâcle was witnessed by the Netanyahoo, who had turned up at Mission Control in hopes of claiming his rightful place in history as the Richard Nixon of the Middle East; and no doubt the wreckage will be cited for the next few thousand years as divine proof that Arabs have no right to the moon.