The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has confirmed that space is total wank.
'For decades, we at NASA have been deceiving everyone,' admitted Head of Making Space Seem Sexy, Sarah Spelman. 'Naive adults, and children who like making space rockets out of toilet roll tubes and foil, they think it's all buggering about in zero gravity and squirting cola globules into each others' mouths.
'But anyone who knows what it's really like up there understands it's pretty much an endless tedium, intermixed with attempting to avoid the gazillion different and terrifying ways space is trying to end you horrifically. Let me tell you, space is a complete c*nt.
'Don't get me wrong, there's some pretty extraordinary stuff out there in between all of the space, but it's all so ludicrously far away, no human will ever get to visit it in person. Well, not in anything we build. I mean, keep watching sci-fi films and playing with space Lego, but do that in an environment which doesn't suck the life out of you if you haven't shut the door properly.
'All these cool, heroic men and women who go up into space? Yeah, that's a sort of a screwy Catch 22. If you're mad enough to want to go into space, then we definitely let you go. Perfect place for those nuts billionaires to take themselves off to permanently, if you ask me.
'Space f*cks with your mind, wrecks your body, and you can't wait to get back to this lovely planet - the only place in the cosmos which isn't pant-wettingly lethal. We pretty much just send robots up there now. Landing washing machines on fast-moving comets; remote controlled buggies zipping about all over Mars... next we're going to put up a robo-giraffe ice skating majestically round the rings of Saturn. It won't unlock any secrets of the universe, but it will flummox sodding aliens. And that's what it's all about really, isn't it?'