Playing pranks isn't rocket science ... but wouldn't it be awesome if it was? That's what NASA scientists thought when they played these incredible pranks, and we're making you a promise up front: we'll get through this list without saying "out of this world" if it kills us.
1. Apollo Porn
Apollo 11 might have immortalized the first men on the lunar surface, but the follow-up mission included an even more important event: the first human pornography on another planetary body.
This question is also a useful check to see if returning astronauts are real men or alien shapeshifters.
The backup crew had reproduced Playboy centerfolds in the astronaut checklists, reprinted on fireproof plastic paper and tethered to the spacesuit's wrists -- making this pornography more resilient, conveniently located and further traveled than everyone you've ever met. Astronauts Al Bean and Pete Conrad only discovered the lovely ladies while thumbing through the booklets on mission, i.e., while walking on the surface of the moon.
If you need an actual rocket science manual to give you that instruction, you're beyond help.
These Tits on the Moon, which we've capitalized because we're going to make that into a movie, caused the astronauts to laugh so much Mission Control accused them of being drunk. Which would have been the only prank even manlier.
2. Prank Calling Mission Control
The art of prank calling has been almost destroyed by YouTube, with thousands of schmucks recording themselves screeching down phone lines in ways which would make Bart Simpson say "Grow up, dudes." Luckily the ultimate prank call was played back in 1973 by Dr Owen K. Garriot.
More man than you'll ever be (and possibly the first off-world shop teacher).
Garriott decided to play a little prank to stay busy on Skylab, since he was only doing things like "performing outer space experiments" and "more than doubling the previous record for manned spaceflight" at the time. He'd taken a portable tape-recorder off-world, surprising Mission Control with the sound of his wife answering the communications.
The call was coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE! Oh, and the house was 250 miles straight up.
When ground controller Robert Crippen -- who was in on the joke -- demanded to know what she was doing up there, she replied that she'd wanted to bring the boys some fresh food and visit for a few days. They continued the back and forth for several sentences before signing off, leaving every other prank call in history literally hundreds of miles beneath the lofty heights they'd reached.
3. Off-World Water
Think of the sites you check every day. If even one of them is as incredible as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day then you're a goddamn liar, and you should think about how you're wasting your life every time you log on to Facebook.
Hubble image of the incredible star cluster NGC 602. But yeah, what Justin Bieber had for lunch is really cool too.
But even this incredible use of the internet -- truly educating us with things we'd never otherwise have seen, in the way it was meant to before the porn and status messages turned up -- still has a sense of humor. Which is why NASA unveiled definitive photographic proof of water on Mars. On April 1st 2005.
We hear this one's actually in a creationist textbook
This year, they topically took a picture of water on the moon.
Of course, the conspiracy nuts say it's all faked.
Other April 1st NASA pranks have included a Space Quidditch match, the Owl constellation, and the green cheese Moon's expiration date.
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