Well apparently I shouldn't have had the snark because even I couldn't get it right. Should have been US Navy, which built and operated the Clementine spacecraf

Well apparently I shouldn't have had the snark because even I couldn't get it right. Should have been US Navy, which built and operated the Clementine spacecraft which discovered large reservoirs of water on the moon. Follow-up missions by NASA and ISRO confirmed this with better instruments, but it was a military mission that made the initial discovery. It's a bit of a contentious issue because loonies had trouble getting NASA interested in the Moon again, and NASA rejected without evidence the notion of cold trap volatiles. So they went around NASA and used defense money to get an early version of Lunar Prospector launched, which was the Clementine mission, and gave the evidence necessary to prove the value of the poles as potential sources of in-situ resources. (I got all the details of this from a talk given by a retired Air Force general who was involved, so I mistakenly thought it was the Air Force that ran it. Looks like it was actually a research division within the Navy.) https://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/slidesets/clem2nd/ https://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/slidesets/clem2nd/